BrandonHD

If you think Stalinists are better than liberals then idk what to tell you

Reposting this banger from @ContraPoints. Leftists overestimate themselves massively. They're not nearly as eclectically well-read as they think they are.

I’m a liberal and I’ve read Marx, Engels, Mises, Hayek, Schumpeter etc. I’ve never met a socialist who has read the last three.

Nothing like a French cost of living riot to remind you that America has some of the quietest street politics in the Western world

I sometimes go back and look at some intellectuals on the left who brazenly defended October 7 attacks and it still chills me

We ought not to scoff at the sheer magnitude of our comfort just because our peers share it (which says more about socioeconomic assortation than it does about how common our salaries are). We literally cannot imagine how privileged we are relative to the average living human.

On some level, abolition is a vision of the world not without police, but where everyone is asked to be police, all the time. Your time constantly occupied with monitoring your neighbors, “holding them accountable,” counseling them, “educating” them, shaming them, and punishing them. I’m not interested in that work or in that world. I do not think the best vision of life is where we’re all constantly enmeshed that deeply in an interminable act of mutual “accountability.” Most of the time, I want to leave my neighbors alone; I want them to leave me alone. I want to have a place that is a refuge from “the community,” because “the community” is often (usually?) just the self-appointed individuals who claim to speak on its behalf, and who have the sociopathic ambitions required to defeat other challengers and scare off dissent. In other words, while capitalist atomization has robbed us of many positive social bonds, it has in fact liberated us from many negative ones. The work of a socialist project should certainly involve trying to revive or renew positive sociality, but I do not actually want to return to the “community” dynamics of a medieval peasant village, or a nomadic band on the steppe. I would like *some* measure of privacy and autonomy, and I do not want to be police. I do not want to live under the totalitarian thumb of “the community” any more than I want to live under the totalitarian thumb of capital. And so I am not an abolitionist, because that is what abolition actually offers.

Unbelievable. 3 hours later and the 10Y Note Yield is now above 5.20% for the first time in 19 years. The 10Y Note Yield is now up +50 basis points in 30 days and +30 basis points in 2 days. Even more remarkable is that the average American has no idea this is happening. Yet. The bond market is imploding in front of our eyes.

Leftists shouldn’t remember Gloria Steinem as an opponent. She was a vital broker of ideas, organizations, and people who connected social movements to mainstream political institutions and helped make a space where the Left and liberalism could meet. jacobin.com/2026/09/steinem-…

Libertarians have disappeared from American politics. Their think tanks and magazines are richly endowed but irrelevant, their ideas exhausted. What happened to champions of free markets and free people? ✍️ @ToryAnarchist Article | spectator.com/article/the-st…