Social media has a parasocial relationship with New York City

his entire fortune is extracted from the public purse. parasite.

I wrote about yoga, genocide, and moral injury for @thebafflermag thebaffler.com/latest/warrio…

No no no no no no no fuck this

A Black man with no institutional backing who walks the walk and calls out fake leftists has upset a yt lady at Jacobin. The man got beaten up trying to get to Gaza last year, something that showed explicit anti-Black racism but let's talk abt his flashy grills & chains.

“Chris Smalls ain’t doing it the white way.” Summary of Jacobin Racist Hit Piece.

Jacobin magazine, the principal mouthpiece of the leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America, today released a hit piece on Amazon labor leader Chris Smalls, @Shut_downAmazon. It could be legit if Jacobin had had an honest critique of Smalls to clarify what class struggle unionist leaders should be doing. But the article is not that at all. It’s a hatchet job against a leading labor activist who has refused to toe the line of the DSA and the business unionist labor leaders who give cover to the so-called progressive Democrats and to the Democratic Party as a whole, despite shocking betrayals by them against working people. The crux of the real reason why Jacobin went after Smalls is contained in this sentence: “[Smalls] blames the two-party system for the state of the American labor movement…” Smalls is spot on about this and the need to break from the Democratic and Republican parties. We need a new party of the working class. The DSA leadership, on the other hand, sees giving cover to the Democratic Party as job number one. The Democratic Party is the party under whom the genocide in Gaza began and which engineered the breaking of the railroad workers’ strike — both under President Joe Biden. ALL Democrats in the House, including DSA star AOC voted to break the strike. The Democratic Party is one of the two most powerful capitalist parties in the world, and in no way represents working people or the oppressed. Business unionist labor leaders are those who have made peace with the capitalist system and are driven by protecting their careers, which means placating the bosses, not organizing the rank and file against the bosses to win substantive working-class victories. Refusing to fight the bosses also means aligning with the parties of the bosses, like the Democratic Party. The overwhelming majority of the labor leadership today is business unionist, with some crucial exceptions like Smalls. We need a reckoning in the labor movement. Brother Smalls has put his life on the line for the antiwar movement in solidarity with the Palestinia people against the Israeli state’s genocide bankrolled by both the Democratic and Republican parties. Smalls went on a Gaza aid flotilla carrying food, baby formula, diapers and medicine in the context of catastrophic levels of mass starvation in Gaza. The flotilla was attacked by the Israeli military, who physically assaulted Smalls, and kicked and choked him. In contrast, AOC has voted for the Iron Dome which is part of the Israeli state’s genocidal apparatus. For having the temerity to expose AOC and other self-described “progressive” politicians, Smalls is called “narcissistic” by Jacobin, a term the magazine’s editors were apparently forced to retract after they got huge amounts of flak on all social media. Personal attacks and character assassination like in this case are often used by the political establishment’s spokespeople as proxy for their real objections — in this case, the threat they feel from Smalls openly calling out the Democratic Party’s actual role. The only way of rebuilding a militant labor movement is to pose a concrete threat to both the Democratic and Republican parties, which in turn requires a challenge to the business unionist labor leadership. That is the basis on which I won the nation’s highest minimum wage and the Amazon Tax during the decade I was the sole socialist on the Seattle City Council. I am now running as an independent revolutionary socialist against genocidal Democrat Adam Smith. I am calling for an end to all military aid to Israel and an end to all weapons and tech for genocide and imperialist war. kshamasawant.org

do you know why these dogs aren't barking? or why the couple who did vocalize sound so hoarse? it's because it's routine for someone to shove tools into their throats to cut their vocal cords. they do this so experimenters aren't disturbed by their cries of agony when they're being tormented in laboratories. I'm ashamed to say that I've conducted experiments on mice in the past. But everything changed the first time I went with a colleague to her primates lab in the same building. I'm still haunted by what I saw. Nothing—no medication, no advancement, no technology, no entertainment, no profit—is worth the price these innocent sentient lives pay.

Watching this is absolutely painful.. I added subtitles to the video because I don’t think the mainstream media covered the story of the 12yo autistic child who was tortured by the Zionist state..

What Israel is doing in Lebanon is unambiguously genocidal against Shias. And it is unambiguously an attempt to reoccupy and even annex a huge part of the country. It’s infuriating that we’re pretending that there’s a ceasefire. And even more infuriating that Western media continues to turn a blind eye to Israel’s endless colonial expansion and insatiable hunger for Arab land.

Meanwhile, this was Hayao Miyazaki's reaction when a team of developers showed him a demonstration of using generative AI for animation.

The best still living film director is by far Hayao Miyazaki and him calling AI "an insult against life itself" while all these filmbro directors are one for one embracing it has made that painfully clear...

RT @kortizart: This company’s models were trained on web scraped datasets (like LAION) and their founders are ex-Stability AI employees who…

this is a visual metaphor for the fate of their fake "state"

This @iloveboostersmv soundtrack💀… GOLD.

What Boots has done with a tight budget and a will- a vocation- to do everything on-camera is nothing short of a miracle.

Honestly, Mamdani and his PR team are incredibly savvy. They're doing exactly what they promised: rebuilding the people’s trust in government, but through perception first. Take the Israeli parade. First, he announces he'll be skipping it. That dominates headlines and reinforces the image of a mayor willing to take a bold stand, even at political risk. People who were skeptical start questioning their skepticism because the move feels authentic and principled. Then, after that positive perception takes hold, you get something like the video below. He still announces that he won't attend the parade himself, so he keeps the positive publicity. But at the same time, he says he'll send a member of his administration instead: Jessica Tisch, whom he chose to retain despite her family's well-known ties to Netanyahu. Most people won't notice the distinction. A small number like myself will criticize it, but by then the mass deception has already been established. The public focus shifts from scrutinizing the contradiction to defending the image of a "principled mayor." The net result is growing support, deeper belief in the system, and no political cost for it. This is the same pattern I saw with his pro-Palestinian messaging. "Free Palestine" goes viral, his supporters rally behind him, and his popularity grows. Then later, he starts saying in interviews that “Israel has a right to exist.” When I called it out and challenged him directly, the base had already been manipulated into a loyal following built around a radical image of him. Only months later did my criticism start to go mainstream, but by then the cycle had already reset and repeated itself. That's what makes the strategy so effective. The headline-grabbing position comes first. The nuance comes later. By the time people notice the difference, the public perception has already been set and he’s onto the next thing.

No Israeli settler has ever taken up arms for Palestinian liberation. Other fascist/colonial regimes had at least pockets of such resistance, from Germans opposing Nazism to French fighting with Algeria, which is why Zionists are the worst of them all.

birds historically being a symbol for freedom makes this so fitting and perfect

This was done with tight resources and endless effort and imagination. Humanware!