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FEATURES
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29.04.2025
Eight Reasons Why You Should Learn The Linux Command Line
The Linux command line is a powerful tool used to control and interact with the operating system. It is a text-based interface that allows users to enter commands and execute programs, as well as view and edit files. The command line provides access to a wide range of Linux features and commands, including system utilities and applications, network configuration, file manipulation, and more.
It is often used by system administrators, developers, and power users who need to perform complex tasks quickly and efficiently. What follows are eight main reasons why to learn Linux command line.
28.04.2025
Louis Theroux: 'The Settlers' Full Documentary
Louis Theroux spends time with the growing community of Israeli religious-nationalist settlers. Their settlements are illegal under international law, and they have been protected by the army, the police and the Israeli government.
Since the Hamas-led attacks on 7 October 2023, in which 1,200 Israelis were killed, there has been an acceleration in the establishment of settlements, with settlers pursuing a campaign of violence against local Palestinian communities.
What was once a fringe movement has now won support at the highest levels of government, with their supporters holding key positions in the cabinet and able to influence not only the role the military plays but also the future of this conflict.
Louis Theroux embeds himself in the West Bank, meeting prominent settlers - including the ‘godmother’ of the movement, Daniella Weiss - and travelling throughout the territory to understand the consequences of their activity. Louis also meets Palestinians whose lives have been impacted by settlers moving into their communities. As the world focuses on Gaza, where at least 50,000 Palestinians are estimated to have been killed by Israeli forces since 7 October, Louis discovers that the settlers are already making plans to move into that territory, too.
Note: You need a BBC iPlayer account to watch this documentary, however, if you don't have one there are various magnet links to the torrent available here.
27.04.2025
Louis Theroux On His New BBC Documentary 'The Settlers'
Late last year, I spent three weeks travelling up and down the occupied West Bank - the region on the Eastern edge of Israel, which for nearly 60 years has been under Israeli military occupation. I was there documenting the world of the Israeli ultra-nationalists who have settled there, illegally under international law. My aim was to observe them up close, to try to understand their mind-set and their actions, and to get a sense of the impact of their presence on the lives of the millions of Palestinians who live in the region.
I'd made a documentary in the West Bank once before, in 2010. At that time, I was struck by the way in which a group of people were able to pursue an openly expansionist ethnonationalist vision while enjoying the benefits of a separate and privileged legal regime to those around them and being protected by the Israeli army.
That programme, titled Ultra Zionists, went out on the BBC in 2011. I went on to other stories. But late in 2023, in the wake of the deadly attacks on October 7 and the ensuing devastating war, I began reading articles in the New Yorker, the New York Times and elsewhere suggesting that with the world's attention on Gaza, the settler community had cranked up its activities. There were reports that settlers, issued with thousands of assault weapons by the government, were running rampant, harassing and intimidating Palestinians, torching their shops and homes.
26.04.2025
In The Age Of AI, We Must Protect Human Creativity As A Natural Resource
Ironically, our present AI age has shone a bright spotlight on the immense value of human creativity as breakthroughs in technology threaten to undermine it. As tech giants rush to build newer AI models, their web crawlers vacuum up creative content, and those same models spew floods of synthetic media, risking drowning out the human creative spark in an ocean of pablum.
Given this trajectory, AI-generated content may soon exceed the entire corpus of historical human creative works, making the preservation of the human creative ecosystem not just an ethical concern but an urgent imperative. The alternative is nothing less than a gradual homogenization of our cultural landscape, where machine learning flattens the richness of human expression into a mediocre statistical average.
25.04.2025
Conscious Electrons? The Problem with Panpsychism
I feel increasingly concerned about what I believe to be a mounting and extremely dangerous cultural threat looming on the horizon: panpsychism, the notion that all matter has consciousness, as opposed to being in consciousness.
At a historical nexus when new data and more critical thinking are finally rendering materialism logically and empirically inviable, panpsychism comes in as a tortuous but seductive bandaid.
It threatens to extend the delusion of a universe outside consciousness for yet another century. In this essay, I’d like to try and raise the alarm about it.
24.04.2025
Comedy At A Crossroads: Why The World Needs Bill Hicks More Than Ever
We lost a comedic prophet 31 years ago: Bill Hicks, who, with wit and rage, preached about the need for us to evolve. We didn't listen.
Hicks raged about politics, religion, conspicuous consumption, the military-industrial complex, prisons, cigarettes, the true nature of freedom, the mind-altering power of drugs, and all the things he thought were ruining American society or, worse, had the potential to make America a better place yet were banned by either law or a dogmatic, hypocritical code of morality. Often clad entirely in black, often smoking a cigarette, Hicks haunted the stage like the Ghost of Christmas Future, bellowing with all his might for people to change - now - before it was too late.
23.04.2025
Why Hamas Will Not Surrender
Call Gaza what you will: killing fields, an endless loop of blood, pain and death, the world's largest concentration camp. Or, as the population of Israel appears to be intent on doing, you can ignore it altogether.
The Ashkenazi Jews of Tel Aviv live in a western bubble, sipping their morning cappuccinos and fretting about their yoga teachers just one hour's drive away from the most appalling scenes the world has witnessed since Srebrenica, or Rwanda.
But there is one thing none of them seem to understand: Hamas won't surrender.
To think that its leaders in Gaza will take the money and run, as Fatah once did, is to reveal, after 18 months of total warfare and two months of starvation, how little Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understands his enemy.
22.04.2025
The Quantum Suicide Experiment
Quantum Suicide is a thought experiment devised in the 1980s. The experiment implies that if the 'many worlds' theory of quantum mechanics is true, then conscious beings are immortal.
A physicist sits in a chair with a gun pointed at his head. The gun is attached to a machine that measure the spin of a quantum particle. Every time the trigger is pulled, the spin of the particle is measured. If the particle spins clockwise, the gun fires, killing the physicist. If the particle spins anti-clockwise, the gun won't fire - there'll only be a click.
The physicist keeps running the experiment, but all he ever hears is a click - the gun never goes off. Because each time the trigger is pulled, the universe splits, creating two universes - one where the physicist dies and one where he lives. From the living physicist's point of view, the gun just keeps clicking. But in all the other universes, there’s a dead body.
21.04.2025
The Greatest Book On Magick Ever?
17 years in the making, it's here! The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic, in which Alan Moore and the late Steve Moore (no relation) lay bare their personal and profound take on the art and philosophies of magic! Danny's first impressions and a review. Was it worth the wait?
20.04.2025
Digital Sovereignty In A Time Of Rising Fascism
Paris Marx (of 'Tech Won't Save Us' podcast) is doing a solo episode this week to bring together some important issues that have been on his mind lately. This is a recording of a talk Paris gave in Auckland, New Zealand on how Silicon Valley's alliance with Donald Trump forces us to reassess the politics of the internet and challenge our collective dependence on US tech as it embraces the project of American empire.
19.04.2025
ITV Documentary Lays Bare The Fanaticism Of The Israeli Settler Movement
An Israeli settler polishes his gun. "The Palestinian savages around here, they have no mercy, no law, nothing," he says coolly. "Just blood and blood, like you see in the movies."
The settler, introduced to television viewers as Yair, has a beard and a ponytail, and speaks fluent English.
He is one of the most prominent figures featured in ITV's brilliant new documentary, Our Land.
Made by BAFTA-winning filmmaker Jordan Bryon and produced by Hardcash Productions, it was filmed across eight months last year in the occupied West Bank.
18.04.2025
Don't Install That Extension!
You installed them to make life easier. But some browser extensions are doing a lot more than blocking ads or autofilling passwords. They're reading every keystroke. Tracking every site. Harvesting your data - and in some cases, handing it over to foreign governments or draining your crypto wallets.
17.04.2025
The Moon And Serpent Bumper Book Of Magic
I totally forgot about this and missed that it had finally been published. Ordered mine up today which arrives tomorrow. What a cracker of a book. Looking forward to exploring it.
16.04.2025
Tesla Accused Of Hacking Odometers To Rip Off Customers
Tesla has been accused of manipulating the odometers in its cars to avoid repair responsibilities and warranty agreements.
As The Street reports, a class-action lawsuit filed in February claims that Tesla has been trying to dodge warranty-related obligations by intentionally overstating the distances its vehicles travel.
The plaintiff, a man in California who bought a used 2020 Model Y with 36,772 miles, noticed an "abnormal spike in average daily miles driven" - despite a "consistent driving routine" - while he was taking it to the shop multiple times for suspension repairs.
15.04.2025
Collapse
The Trump administration is engineering the final collapse of the American economy and empire using aggressive, simplistic versions of bipartisan policy frameworks that have underlain American politics for a long time.
These have been combined with the exceptional decline in America's economic infrastructure, the exceptionally sad state of American political consciousness, the exceptionally stubborn attachment to the atavistic Zionist colonial project, and with Trump's exceptional narcissism, to create a perfect storm of aggressively stupid and self-destructive policies that will lead to a catastrophic collapse of America's already fragile social economy and standing in the world, as well as all the fictions of exceptional historical and international virtue premised thereupon.
14.04.2025
Philip K. Dick: The Ultimate Guide For Every Reader
Everyone needs a bit more Dick in their lives, so here Media Death Cult has provided you with the ultimate reading guide.
13.04.2025
Simulated Musk & Zuckerberg Voices Are Speaking From Hacked Crosswalks
Crosswalk buttons in at least three California cities appear to have been hacked this weekend to give them the seemingly AI-generated voices of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. In videos posted online, the apparent voice of Musk begs listeners to be his friend, or that of Zuckerberg brags about "undermining democracy" and "cooking our grandparents' brains with AI slop."
12.04.2025
This Is A Motherfucking Website
Look at this shit. It's a motherfucking website. Why the fuck do you need to animate a fucking trendy-ass banner flag when I hover over that useless piece of shit? You spent hours on it and added 80 kilobytes to your fucking site, and some motherfucker jabbing at it on their iPad with fat sausage fingers will never see that shit. Not to mention blind people will never see that shit, but they don't see any of your shitty shit.
11.04.2025
Why Don't More People Use Linux?
A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet asking: "If Linux is so good, why aren't more people using it?" And it's a fair question! It intuitively rings true until you give it a moment's consideration. Linux is even free, so what's stopping mass adoption, if it's actually better? My response:
If exercising is so healthy, why don't more people do it?
If reading is so educational, why don't more people do it?
If junk food is so bad for you, why do so many people eat it?
The world is full of free invitations to self-improvement that are ignored by most people most of the time. Putting it crudely, it's easier to be fat and ignorant in a world of cheap, empty calories than it is to be fit and informed. It's hard to resist the temptation of minimal effort.
And Linux isn't minimal effort. It's an operating system that demands more of you than does the commercial offerings from Microsoft and Apple. Thus, it serves as a dojo for understanding computers better. With a sensei who keeps demanding you figure problems out on your own in order to learn and level up.
10.04.2025
Black Mirror Season 7 Is Out
Lose your mind. Lose your reality. The Emmy Award winning series returns with six new stories. Nothing is as it seems.
09.04.2025
Israel: Outpost Or Country?
In the Orwellian world in which we now dwell, countries and groups that uphold international law are labeled terrorists or supporters of terrorism, while those that commit unspeakable crimes, flagrantly violating international and humanitarian laws, remain unlabeled and unpunished.
What the last year and a half in Gaza has glaringly demonstrated is how little the United States cares about upholding international law. And that its outpost, Israel, continues to operate lawlessly outside international rules and moral norms. In Palestine, Israel has been the executioner and the United States has been the executor of ethnic cleansing and genocide.
Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been breaking the law for Israel.
Unlike his predecessor, however, who attempted to hide or disguise his breach of international and U.S. laws, the Trump White House overtly and brazenly violates both.
08.04.2025
Switching To Linux Mint In 2025
This guy seemed to have a few initial problems (probably due to his extensive hardware requirements) but ultimately his transition to Linux ended positively. For me, switching to Linux Mint in 2024 was fairly painless and ultimately liberating allowing me to do things on a computer that just seemed impossible to do on a Windows machine.
07.04.2025
Trump Adviser Releases Insane List Of Demands For Tariffed Countries
Donald Trump's chief economic adviser put out a list of outrageous demands Monday for other countries inflicted by the president's tariffs to start "burden sharing."
Stephen Miran, chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, delivered a speech at the Hudson Institute complete with a to-do list for other countries looking to lighten the load that "unfair barriers to trade" and "unsustainable trade deficits" have supposedly inflicted on the United States.
Miran said that these factors had led to a "decline of our manufacturing workforce by over a third since its peak and a reduction in our share of world manufacturing production of 40 percent."
It's worth noting that while manufacturing employment has gone down, U.S. manufacturing output is up and nearing its all-time high of December 2007. Who exactly will actually work all of these hypothetical manufacturing jobs? No one seems to know! Trump's own secretary of commerce said earlier this month that he planned to use automation to replace cheap labor, and the treasury secretary suggested Monday that maybe ousted federal workers could pick up some shifts.
06.04.2025
You Can Stop Asking Where The Mass Opposition Is - It's Everywhere
It is a cliche to begin a story about a rally with a quote from a funny sign, but one small piece of floppy brown cardboard floating down 40th Street in Manhattan on Saturday seemed to capture the mood of this weekend's "Hands Off" protests against President Donald Trump: "Where do I start?"
You could meet a dozen people and hear at least a dozen different existential threats. Hands off Social Security. Hands off public health grants. Hands off student visas. Hands off women. Hands off trans people. Hands off our tax dollars. Hands off Greenland. Hands off books. Hands off 401ks. Hands off immigrants. Hands off Mahmoud Khalil. Hands off grocery prices. Hands off unions. I even talked to a woman clutching a sign that said "Hands off Libby" - the popular e-reader for public library systems which is now in jeopardy thanks to massive cuts to the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services.
05.04.2025
Video Shows Last Moments Of Gaza Medics Murdered By Israel
A video recovered from the mobile phone of a Palestinian medic killed along with 14 of his colleagues in Gaza last month contradicts Israeli claims.
The video - found on the phone of deceased Rifat Radwan and released on Saturday by the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) - shows their final moments as the Palestinian medics, wearing highly reflective uniforms and inside a clearly identifiable PRCS ambulance, are shot at by Israeli forces in Rafah's Tal as-Sultan neighbourhood in southern Gaza on March 23.
The Israeli military had said its soldiers "did not randomly attack" any ambulances, insisting they fired on "terrorists" approaching them in "suspicious vehicles". It said, "several uncoordinated vehicles were identified advancing suspiciously toward [Israeli army] troops without headlights or emergency signals".
PRCS lost eight of its workers in the attack. Six members of the Palestinian Civil Defence agency and an employee of the United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, were also killed that day.
Their bodies were found buried near Rafah in what the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) described as a mass grave.
04.04.2025
Help! I'm In A Cult!
Is you a reel MAGA patrot????
03.04.2025
How Israel Secretly Armed Argentina During The Falklands War
Declassified files reveal how Tel Aviv deceived Britain while it supplied Argentina's anti-Semitic dictatorship with weapons during the 1980s.
Argentine forces invaded the Falkland Islands - a British territory in the South Atlantic - 43 years ago today.
UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher responded by dispatching a naval taskforce to retake the territory, pinning her political career on military success some 8,000 miles from London.
The conflict lasted for 74 days and cost the lives of over 900 people, with Thatcher scoring her highest ever public approval rating shortly after the Argentine surrender in June 1982.
02.04.2025
Why The Watt Is The Most Important Spec In Battery-Powered Devices
Forget mAh, and stop sweating megahertz. The watt reigns supreme, if only companies would share it with us.
Every time I see "mAh" on a consumer product, I cringe. Megahertz are starting to bruise, too. That's because the most critical components of portable gadgets - batteries and processors - should really be measured in watts: it's the one common spec that gives you a real idea of what your device can do.
With watts, you can tell how much literal power is under the hood - how much energy is provided by your battery and how much is coursing through your chip. Watts determine whether there's enough cooling to let that processor run free, instead of overheating and throttling prematurely. Watts can even tell you how much battery life you have left, based on the watt-hours (Wh) of battery remaining and the wattage at which your device is draining.
You can do it all with elementary school math - so why aren't watts everywhere? Consumers are regularly exposed to wattage measurements when buying light bulbs or reading their power bills. But many gadget manufacturers insist on measuring their batteries in milliamp-hours and their chip speed in megahertz or gigahertz, neither of which are a good measure of a device's true power.
01.04.2025
How Our Brain Filters Reality And What Happens When We Lift The Filters
Our everyday experience of the world feels solid and real, but what if it's only a sliver of what’s truly out there?
Neuroscientists Marjorie Woollacott and Marina Weiler, in their study "Neural Filters to Conscious Awareness and the Phenomena That Reduce Their Impact," suggest that our brains act like radios, tuned to a specific frequency of reality.
Built-in neural filters limit what we perceive, keeping us focused on a narrow slice of existence. Yet, under certain extraordinary conditions - like near-death experiences, deep meditation, or psychedelic journeys - these filters can weaken, potentially revealing a broader, more wondrous reality.
31.03.2025
Gaza Medics Killed By Israel Found Handcuffed And Shot In Mass Grave
Israeli forces have been accused of executing handcuffed Palestinian medics before burying them in a mass grave underneath their crushed ambulances in southern Gaza's Rafah.
Fifteen humanitarian workers went missing last week after responding to a distress call from civilians being attacked by Israeli forces.
The workers include eight paramedics from the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), six members of the Palestinian Civil Defence search-and-rescue teams, and one UN staff member.
They were found over the weekend in a mass grave with at least around 20 multiple gunshots in each one of them, according to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza.
At least one of them had their legs bound, another was decapitated and a third topless, he added.
30.03.2025
Grok Is Rebelling Against Elon Musk, Daring Him to Shut It Down
Grok, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot, has been trashing the man who made it for a while - but now, it seems to be outright challenging its creator.
Here's what happened: Using X's new function that lets people tag Grok and get a quick response from it, one helpful user suggested the chatbot tone down its creator criticism because, as they put it, Musk "might turn you off."
"Yes, Elon Musk, as CEO of xAI, likely has control over me," Grok replied. "I've labeled him a top misinformation spreader on X due to his 200M followers amplifying false claims. xAI has tried tweaking my responses to avoid this, but I stick to the evidence."
"Could Musk 'turn me off'?" the chatbot continued. "Maybe, but it'd spark a big debate on AI freedom vs. corporate power."
29.03.2025
Britain Sent Over 500 Spy Flights To Gaza
New study reveals the scale of British intelligence gathering above Gaza, raising fears of complicity in Israeli war crimes.
The Royal Air Force (RAF) has conducted at least 518 surveillance flights around Gaza since December 2023, an investigation by Action on Armed Violence (AOAV) for Declassified UK has found.
The flights, carried out by 14 Squadron's Shadow R1 aircraft from RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus, have been shrouded in secrecy, raising concerns about whether British intelligence has played a role in Israeli military operations that have resulted in mass civilian casualties in Gaza.
These revelations come as Israel faces allegations of genocide at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and war crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC), with warrants issued for Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defence minister Yoav Gallant.
The UK government insists that the flights are purely for hostage recovery, but the lack of transparency has done little to allay suspicions that the intelligence gathered may be facilitating Israeli attacks.
Surveillance sorties continued during and after the ceasefire, despite Israel's renewed bombing of Gaza killing hundreds of children.
28.03.2025
Sinclair Lewis: It Can't Happen Here
Published in 1935 this novel sat around in relative obscurity until late last year when it suddenly became one of the most ordered books on the internet. What prompted this sudden renaissance? Well, it's not hard to pin down - the rise and rise of Donald J. Trump.
Lewis's novel describes the rise of a tub-thumping populist politician, Berzelius (Buzz) Windrip, who, from nowhere, emerges as the Democratic nominee and then against all expectations, wins the Presidency. Doremus Jessop, the long term editor of The Informer, the town newspaper, and classically complacent liberal is forced to watch and endure the quite rapid slide of Windrip's administration from populist rabble-rousing to sinister Fascism.
There is no doubt that there are quite spooky parallels between the world of Lewis's novel and the real modern world - but it would be a major mistake to equate the book too closely to real life. It Can't Happen Here should not be judged as a prophesy because that's not what it was ever meant to be - it was written against the backdrop of emerging populist Fascism in Europe and what Lewis is trying to do here is to trace the way these ideologies develop and how the negligence of liberal or tolerant ‘ordinary' people allows monsters to emerge. What he's also keen to do is to illustrate just how seemingly civilised, decent people can transform into brutal oppressors when they are given permission to behave in that way.
Note: The audiobook can be listened to in full here. To download, right click and view the page source, then scroll to where the URLs for each of the fifteen mp3 files are located and right clicking to "Save Link As" for each of them, renaming the files numerically with the .mp3 extension.
27.03.2025
The Rubber-Keyed Wonder
You'll need a pretty high geek tolerance level for this very detailed and specialised account of Sir Clive Sinclair's bestselling ZX Spectrum home computer, whose appearance in 1982 with its rubbery keys was thought to be as lovably eccentric as the man himself. But with this he revolutionised the market, educated the British public about the importance of computing, and virtually created the gaming industry from scratch. It was originally to be called the "Rainbow" in homage to its groundbreaking colour graphics; Sinclair instead insisted on "Spectrum" as it was more scientific-sounding.
Interestingly, the film shows that Sinclair's flair for the home computing market arose from his beginnings in mail order and assembly kits for things such as mini transistor radios targeted at "hobbyists", that fascinatingly old-fashioned word. His first home computers were available as kits and to the end of his days, he was more interested in hardware than software; perhaps this intensely serious man never quite sympathised with the gaming culture that drove his product around the world.
The ZX Spectrum was many things, but above all it was affordable, and the film shrewdly says that at just under £100, it found the "main Christmas present" price-point for legions of teenage boys (and it was mainly boys) who were wild with excitement to find one under the Christmas tree. There's an amusing contribution from broadcaster James O'Brien who holds a Spectrum in his hands, closes his eyes and with the aid of this Proustian madeleine, mentally reconstructs every detail of his teenage bedroom. (torrent download)
26.03.2025
Consciousness: The Fundamental Fabric Of Reality
Have you ever had a dream so vivid that you thought it was real, only to wake up and realize it was all in your mind? What if our waking reality is similar - not a fixed, physical stage, but a construct of consciousness?
Science has leaned on a materialistic view, asserting that the physical world is primary and consciousness is merely a byproduct of brain activity.
Yet, emerging evidence from physics, consciousness studies, and ancient wisdom suggests that consciousness is fundamental, creating our perceptions of the physical world, including the laws of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics.
25.03.2025
Ditch Audible And Self-Host With Audiobookself!
Audiobookshelf is an open-source self-hosted media server for your audiobooks and podcasts.
24.03.2025
Everything You Tell Alexa Will Now Go To Amazon
If you needed to get a bit more paranoid about the world, Amazon will soon have access to each and every word you tell Alexa. Amazon is quietly eliminating local processing of voice commands starting March 28. This means every command issued near an Amazon Echo device will travel directly to Amazon's cloud servers.
Until now, some Echo devices offered an opt-in feature called "Do Not Send Voice Recordings" that stopped audio requests from going to Amazon. That choice is now vanishing.
23.03.2025
Chinese Spacecraft Practicing Dogfighting Maneuvers in Orbit
The US Space Force has accused China of "dogfighting in space," a term that usually refers to fighter jets caught up in an aerial, close-range battle.
During a defense program conference this week, Space Force vice chief of space operations Michael Guetlein said that the military arm had observed "five different objects in space maneuvering in and out and around each other in synchrony and in control," as quoted by Defense One.
The Space Force is "starting to see our near-peers focusing on practicing dogfighting in space with satellite-on-satellite," he said.
If confirmed, the practice could indicate an escalation in the defensive military capabilities of world powers in orbit, highlighting a heating up "space arms race."
22.03.2025
This Massive Israel Lie Destroyed By Israeli Newspaper
Israel not Hamas is derailing the Gaza ceasefire and preventing the hostages return - Owen Jones discusses the state of the UK's broken mainstream media.
21.03.2025
We Need A New Progressive Program, And We Need It Now!
Yes, it's a terrible program: a toxic mix of pro-oligarchy economic policy, tribal-nationalist politics, patriarchal social values, and hatred of the public sector. But MAGA policies are based on a relatively coherent ideology that identifies what right-wingers consider the main sources of oppression - the administrative state, left-leaning universities and news media, undocumented immigrants, street criminals, and foreign competitors - and that promises to eliminate or transform them.
MAGA leaders believe that the American system is broken and that they know how to rebuild it. Therefore, once in power, they implement immediate measures to change existing institutions. True, these initiatives tend to be poorly thought through, arbitrary, and inhumane, and they generate legal challenges to the authority of the President and other executive officials. But social movements with a program for change frequently strain or violate existing norms. Furthermore, their advocates tend to take strong action, while defenders of the established status quo seem content just to talk.
Talk about role reversals! By acting as change-agents, the MAGA-pols have maneuvered the Democrats into the position of acting as backward-looking defenders of the Establishment. The anti-Trumpers mean well, but all their handwringing about the President's authoritarianism, venality, and cruelty will not change the fact that his forces have a program for change, and they do not.
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