it’s just some dumbass asshole dad

He got a good beating, I don’t think he deserves permanent neurological damage though.

Think how much you’re paying for your degree. If you get a student loan, run the numbers - until you start paying it back, they’re paying you to learn. So make the most of it. You will never have this much free time to educate yourself again in your life.

As for distractions and flow state - it’s just about getting on with it. Your brain has spent years being used to having fun doing shit that is designed specifically to be fun. Books arent designed with that in mind.

Unfortunately it is just a motivation thing. You just have to do it. Lest you become a slop-head.

And I think in that final quote comes to another heart of the matter. Conservatives are proudly ignorant, whereas liberals are unaware of how ignorant they are - which in the grand scheme of things almost makes them more ignorant than conservatives.

In the most extreme form, contrast social democracy with fascism. European socialized healthcare and so on was made possible by imperial profits.

Liberalism at home, fascism abroad.

When countries have a lot of socialized infrastructure - good schools, hospitals, job schemes, and so on - they tend towards liberalism. They tend toward a belief in social welfare, because they all benefit from it - and when society is structured in this egalitarian way, people’s views become more egalitarian overall.

However, they are also happy to live in false consciousness, espousing liberal views while turning a blind eye to the horrors abroad - and often the government and private media help to make them ignorant of it. The racial hierarchy is present, but it’s much more present abroad.

If this state was fascist, it’s guns blazing abroad - white makes might makes right - but this fascist hierarchy is also present at home. Let the strongest man win, so the strongest in society subjugate the rest beneath them. It always requires and outgroup - and in the most extreme case this outgroup is not only enslaved, it is externinated. There still might even be some social programs (as was the case in Nazi Germany), but again, people turn a blind eye to the horrors because they are living happily.

So there you have it. There is a clear difference, but also no difference at all.

They’re both just different flavours of false consciousness - and it’s hard to say whose consciousness is more false.

I don’t disagree with your point here but Nazis wanted to turn such parts of the world into very literal slave plantations - with forced labourers in chains and all white overseers - whereas the Allies were content with owning the means of production, having low wage labourers work on it, and even collaborating with foreign upper classes.

the capitalisation on on the I in EpsteIn makes it feel like LinkedIn

and that’s sort of what it was

He’s running

Somehow I think a Bill/Hillary ticket could be an absolute powerbomb, the arch ghouls back for one last harvest

No but in all seriousness, I think he might be innocent - in the sense that he probably did fuck 18 year olds on the island, but within the evidence there’s space for him to claim he simply thought they were prostitutes and nothing more. Yes it’s a scandal, but he’s already dealt with the sex-pest allegations. It’s not really a huge stain on his already cum-stained legacy. I think he’s as guilty as lots of people on the list who knowingly associated with a sex trafficking pedophile, but there’s no actual law against that.

If he’s the ‘hero’ to bring it all to light, it absolves his entire reputation. I might even have to call him Based Bill if he did.

It’s nonce, m8

Yeah dawg we’re based

All of the gnarliest anti Israel action in the west since Oct 7th has come out of Britain

Chomsky needs the Aldous Huxley special

LSD via IV drip on deathbed

Because he wrote hugely important works for informing people in their understanding of how much of empire and media manipulation works AND in language development theory?

His seminal works are lauded for a reason, and while we like to say he’s palatable to liberals these days, at the time his work was important, well researched, and quite bold. Go watch him dismantle Thomas Buckley - he used to have the sauce. Furthermore, a large amount of his credit also comes from his work in Linguistics - which he arguably contributed more to than politics.

Ok, sure, he’s now been shown to be a pedophile sympathiser, and in his later years had a bunch of shit takes, but that doesn’t really affect how he rightly came to be known as a prominent public intellectual.

EDIT: got a lot of replies here, not going to reply to each individual one, but briefly:

• Ok, Herman wrote a lot of Manufacturing Consent. Chomsky wrote about 10 other books that have been pathways for people to ‘get into’ knowing more about US hegemony.

• No, he wasn’t a socialist visionary or anything. He was just an active chronicler of some of the darker parts of US history, and I think that’s where his comfortability and relevance lies. He never really suggests anything new apart from something vaguely demsoc/anarchist, and that’s fine. He never really claimed to come up with a better framework.

• RE Michael Parenti - love the guy, have read most books by him. Hot Take however, he’s a much better orator than writer, and as a writer a much better polemicist than documentarian. I find Parenti more fun to read/listen to, and it makes me want to get off my couch and do something - but he doesn’t have the same sustained analysis with citations that Chomsky has. Chomsky is generally drab but very information dense, and as he proposes no real ideology of his own, his work rarely slides into emotive writing. No, he’s not a Marxist or anything - but his information is useful for Marxists to use.

• Yeah alright, this Epstein stuff is damning. But I suppose in response to the original commenter, I only meant to say that he rose to prominence a long time ago with a heap of accolades, so it’s not hard to see why he became a prominent ‘left’ academic.

ye best start believing in Idiocracy sequels

just go outside

that is such a good one

and I can’t believe 28 people even got the reference

deleted by creator

til Patrice Lumumba married a 14 year old

damn

Pete Buttigieg

Bethesda storytelling

eh, what else can you really do in that situation

what

In all honesty, I really wouldn’t bring a gun to a protest. Like, what are you going to do, shoot a cop in self defense? Realistically the answer to that question is no.

I understand it’s your right to do and they should respect that, but open carry and armed police are two stupid concepts that mix together very badly.