Meanwhile they are pissing and moaning over the Evil Empire’s threats to occupy and annex Greenland. Then Washington acting like gangsters is suddenly bad - but not so bad that these cowardly little Eichmanns dare do anything to get out of the Evil Empire’s chains.
“Kommunister i lysthuset”
A direct translation of “lysthus” would be gazebo but “lyst” can also be translated to “lust” or “desire”.
It was lovely. I am still recovering from all the food I had.
The kids loved their presents, the dinner I had cooked was just as I wanted it to be. I spent most of the evening assembling a toy construction crane for our youngest kid. My mother-in-law was less toxic than usual and her attempts at outshining my dinner failed.
If you sell people a phone with enough storage in it you can’t sell them subscription-based cloud storage
My mom bought some awesome South American Christmas ornaments way back in the day. One of them is a parrot and it has been on the tree as long as I can remember.
Parrots are Christmas animals now.
That’s the thing about Trump. For better or worse he’s saying the quiet thing out loud a lot of the time.
I would hope it is because he’s simply too stupid to do the usual rules-based international order of freedom and democracy incantations but I fear it is rather because the reaction has defeated any meaningful opposition so decisively that they no longer feel the need to pretend to be anything but bloodthirsty Nazis.
I work as a computer toucher in the private sector. I usually get a gift card to chose from an assortment of bougie gifts worth about USD 200, the maximum you can get before being taxed. In addition the company pays a Christmas party in the form of a nice dinner at a nice restaurant. I’m not complaining.
My partner on the other hand is a public school teacher. Last year they got an insultingly small bag of caramels and a half-assed Christmas card with a picture of their asshole principal.
Because then we would cram all sorts of ungodly things up there. We’re no better as a species than that.
Don’t tell me what to boil! What is this, communist Russia?
There is a test suite. It tests that three lines are logged to the console. The tests all fail.
It happened in Denmark a few weeks ago. Someone flew a couple of drones near an airport and a military airstrip and everybody lost their shit.
I think I agree with most of what you say. Sex work is horribly exploitative and most sex workers are driven into sex work from precarity.
On the other hand, who am I to tell someone who finds sex work to be the lesser evil compared to a grueling minimum wage job that they’re wrong?
I think it is important to be pro-sex worker. I think you can be this while acknowledging the harm of the sex industry. Personally I don’t think bans and cops are the right response. You can compare this to how doing drugs is obviously bad for you but sending cops to arrest people with substance abuse disorders is only making things worse.
My personal belief is that the best way forward is harm reduction. Both when it comes to the actual sex work (unionisation, labour safety standards, legal protections) but also when it comes to the social factors that promotes sex work. Nobody should be coerced into sex work because the alternative is poverty or mistreatment, any moral society should help people long before they get that desperate. That help should also include adequate and compassionate responses to substance abuse, such as providing patients with free, safe drugs so that they are not forced into crime or prostitution. I also think harm reduction includes social attitudes to sex work, it doesn’t make anything better that sex work is considered shameful and that terms for sex workers are used as misogynistic slurs.
I’m afraid that pushing for criminalisation acts as a bandaid that allows liberals to call it a day and avoid dealing with the harmful structural social factors that causes sex work and worse its outcomes
You’re giving the liberals too much credit by saying they admit that electoralism has never worked.
The liberal position is not only that electoralism works but that it is the only thing that works.
A closely related thing that has bothered me for quite some time is the way supposedly anti-racist liberals love to spread the trope of racists being “losers who have failed at life” and framing racism as a disease of the lower class.
It’s wrong on several levels. There are plenty of majority-ethnic poor people who are not racist. In fact, they are more likely to live and work among racialised people and be less susceptible to racist propaganda.
And at the other end of the scale, there are plenty of people who have been very successful under capitalism who hold racist beliefs. These people are a lot more dangerous than some 
shouting slurs and they are allowed to slip under the radar when every discussion about racism has to be about the racist “losers”.
The trope also exposes liberal class hatred. To the liberal mind, the most morally reprehensible thing you can be is not to be an exploiter, a parasite or an oppressor — it is to be poor.
Every time America does foreign policy someone gets bombed, every time China does foreign policy someone get a strongly worded letter.
Terrorism has very little to do with the actual label and much more to do with who carries out the act and who they do it to.
Terrorism is nothing but a shorthand for violence (in the widest possible sense) that the ruling class dislikes.
It seems like a combination of racism (I bet they wouldn’t get worked up over two Norwegians communicating in their native language) and petty managerial tyranny.
Who could have thought that saying “fuck you and by the way my opponent is right” to voters would not be a winning electoral strategy
Pelle Dragsted is at it again, penning another love letter to the social democratic welfare state. His fantasy of reforming our way to socialism is a cozy mirage for conflict-averse Scandinavians, promoting a socialism where class analysis and class struggle has been replaced by the fairy tales about democracy we were told in social studies class in school.
First order of business: There is no such thing as Nordic socialism in the real world. The Nordic countries are all bourgeois capitalist states in which a class compromise gives workers some comforts without challenging the fundamental ownership of the means of production.
He ignores that the Nordic model’s comforts were won through struggle that was only possible because the October Revolution had put the fear of Jesus in the hearts of the corridor and that the relatively high standard of living is funded by imperialist superprofits extracted from the periphery. His myopic focus on the national realm refuses to confront this parasitic relationship.
Worse, his premise is naively idealist. It assumes the bourgeoisie, upon seeing his “shards of socialism,” will simply surrender their power. History screams otherwise. What happened to Allende? What happened to the Indonesian communists? The moment capital feels threatened, it abandons democratic pretense for violent reaction. The bourgeois state is not a neutral tool; it is structurally designed to protect the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
But Dragsted would never get far enough to become a Nordic Allende. At best he would be another Corbyn and get destroyed by the character assassination of the reactionary press.
Dragsted’s gradualist plan of sovereign wealth funds and co-ops is dependent on maintaining electoral success for decades and is useless as a realistic response to a capital strike. Also, it offers no answer to the physical violence any socialist project will face from the bourgeoisie.
The old syndicalist Christian Christensen once wrote:
Parliament is like the wastebin at a slaughterhouse, full of rotten chunks of meat. Do you think they go fresh again by throwing a piece of good meat in there, or do you think it is them who poison the fresh?
Dragsted used to punch Nazis when he was younger. Back then he understood that some enemies can’t be appeased but must be defeated. But now, after having been pickled in the wastebin for decades, he has turned into a completely harmless round, fluffy social democrat.
Jensen - Denmark