I’ve Had Enough of Cinema’s Obsession with Art as Therapy | Ocula ocula.com/magazine/opinion/c…

And we got the first scalp from the Paramount-Warner deal, incumbent Dem LA Mayor Karen Bass goes down to lefty Nithya Raman. Bass pushed the merger on behalf of billionaire family Larry and David Ellison.

Democrats in the US are overwhelmingly anti-Israel at this point. If the party selects a Zionist shill to lead them in the House and/or the Senate, it will just be more proof that the party is a top-down criminal organization that cares more about money than its own voters.

Bernie Sanders lost the fight in 2016. A decade later, he won the war. politi.co/4ekGIS5

When I put out The Myth of Red Texas a lot of people doubted it and it was ignored by many in the mainstream. But event after event all across the great state, we packed rooms with people who wanted to share a different part of Texas’s history. We reclaimed that history yesterday

Always astounded by commentators who say things like "the working class voted for X" when HALF THE ELECTORATE don't vote. In every US election, the biggest message delivered at the ballot box is "I don't care/fuck this shit"

Gina Hinojosa explains why she doesn’t call herself a liberal or a progressive but a populist: progressivism is associated with culture wars, and is not up to the challenge of our time. Populism is about economic power and is up to the challenge.

Abdul El-Sayed becomes the first left insurgent to win a statewide race with a purple electorate. And he did it on a platform of Medicare-for-All, taxing the rich, and ending arms sales to Israel. The facade that Democratic voters must choose more "moderate" candidates is gone.

this person was 13k votes away from being the dem nominee, i never want to hear about candidate selection from the consultants on here ever again

Under pressure from Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Trump administration may be within days of launching a nuclear strike on Iran. The target would be Pickax Mountain in central Iran, where Israeli intelligence claims the Iranian government has restarted its nuclear enrichment program. No conventional weapon in the American arsenal can penetrate 300 feet of solid granite to destroy the tunnels where enrichment is supposedly taking place. The only military option is a nuclear strike. Netanyahu has been pushing hard for one. “Bibi calls Trump about it every day,” says an informed observer. Netanyahu is cornered and desperate. After last week’s election results, he can’t form a government unless Trump intervenes directly in Israeli politics and brokers a deal with other parties that gives Netanyahu 61 seats in the Knesset. Otherwise, he is out as prime minister and on his way to ignominy, investigations and possibly jail. Netanyahu must stay close to Trump. He needs this war. To that end, he’s applied maximum pressure to his closest allies in the administration, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and CENTCOM commander Brad Cooper. Both oppose a negotiated settlement to the war they’ve so grievously mismanaged; both are pushing to restart major combat operations. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and CIA director John Ratcliffe are also following Netanyahu’s lead, as are leaders of the Democratic Party. In a recent meeting on the subject, former president Barack Obama said he opposes the current Iran peace deal being drafted in Doha. The rest of America’s longtime allies in the Middle East are terrified by the prospect of more war. On September 27th, Netanyahu flew secretly to Abu Dhabi to enlist the UAE in his lobbying effort for a final attack on Iran. The Emiratis refused. After eight months of conflict, Gulf economies are teetering. So are global energy and fertilizer markets. They won’t recover soon. Globally, there are a total of about 850 supertankers used to transport oil from producers to the rest of the world. In October alone, 11 of them were badly damaged in Hormuz. At this pace, a global depression is imminent. A nuclear strike would radically accelerate the destruction. Fallout from a ground explosion at Pickax Mountain would contaminate the Persian Gulf, poisoning the water supply for 100 million people. And those are just some of the immediate consequences for the region. The rest of the world is every bit as exposed. No country other than the United States has ever used a nuclear weapon in war. Some would like to. An American nuclear attack on Iran would set a new precedent. The Russians have already told at least two other governments that an American nuclear strike on Iran would free them to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine. Pakistan and India would be tempted to do the same against each other, as would North Korea against Seoul. After the first nuclear strike, World War Three is inevitable. That war would be short and final. We’ve been sleepwalking toward this moment for months. Since February, the administration has quietly rewritten America’s nuclear doctrine to make first use of so-called “battlefield nukes” easier and therefore more likely. No one in Washington in either party seems bothered by this. Now we’re on the brink of it. Close observers say Trump is likely to decide by next weekend whether or not to use nuclear weapons. That would be November 7, six days from now. To his credit, he’s hesitating. At the moment, Trump is listening to his vice president, JD Vance, and to his envoy and friend Steve Witkoff, both of whom argue a deal with Iran can be made. They’re right, though it won’t be simple. The Iranians are famously frustrating to negotiate with under any circumstances, and elements of that government have become more radical since Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his family were killed in February. After decades of isolation, even relatively moderate Iranian leaders seem confused by how decisions are made in the West. (There is a widespread belief in Tehran, for example, that the United States government controls Israel.) But overall, people who have spoken to decision-makers in Iran say there is consensus there that more war is bad for everyone and a deal is worth making. One group that hasn’t been consulted so far is the global population — the hundreds of millions of people who will be killed along with their children if Trump is pushed by Netanyahu into launching a nuclear strike next week. Now would be the time for them to speak up.

How “Lula’s Army” gained an algorithmic advantage over the right-wing trolls that dominated Brazil’s social media for years. newyorker.com/news/the-lede/…

O jornal Clarín, historicamente associado à centro-direita, fez uma grande matéria sobre o grau de envolvimento dos Estados Unidos na fuga de Flávio Bolsonaro. Merece repercutir mais aqui. Envolve até o controle do aeroporto por parte de agentes americanos. Vou resumir um pouco:

Ele foi exfiltrado. Acho q é difícil pras pessoas q n acompanham tanto política internacional entender o q isso significa. Só se exfiltra espiões e agentes secretos. Metade do país estava disposta a eleger um agente americano, reconhecido como tal pelos próprios americanos.

The New Yorker, is now interested to study the Brazilian working class. They look at André Janones and "Lula’s Army" and call it a "tech-savvy" miracle that reversed the far-right surge. But they are missing the profound civilizational shift that just took place. Let us look at the material reality of those three weeks between the first and second rounds. For years, the empire and the domestic oligarchs treated the internet as their private property. They used Silicon Valley algorithms, dark money, and decentralized right-wing troll farms to isolate, exhaust, and manipulate the public. When Flávio Bolsonaro took the lead in the first round, the left didn't just buy better ads. André Janones digitized the physical solidarity of the streets. He organized millions of ordinary Brazilians into "Lula’s Army," synchronizing their messaging to manually overpower the algorithm. The strategy was so devastatingly effective that the Global North is now begging the Global South for the blueprint. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has requested Janones’s help, and in France, activists are studying "Janonisme" to fight the far-right. Why is the institutional media in New York and Paris suddenly looking to a Brazilian politician to learn how to survive the digital age? Because for a decade, the empire believed the working class was too atomized and too exhausted to fight back online. They thought the digital realm was permanently locked behind algorithms controlled by right-wing billionaires. But Brazil proved a beautiful, undeniable truth: when ordinary people—the nurses, the bus drivers, the students—synchronize their dignity, no algorithm can contain them. The left didn't just "hack" a social media platform; they broke the empire's digital enclosure. The Global North spent billions building a digital cage for the world. But the Brazilian working class just figured out how to pick the lock, and now the rest of the world is asking them for the key. nitter.siddz.com/AndreJanonesMG/status/…

The real question is not why the young are revolting, but why it took them so long. The triggers may differ — schools in France and Belgium, housing in Spain and Portugal, the cost of living in Italy, corruption and a mixture of the above in Serbia — but the root is the same. These are the protests of a generation that believes it has been robbed of its future. It’s a conclusion that’s hard to argue with. The social contract its parents knew — work hard and you will, at the very least, secure a home, be able to support a family and be better off than those that came before you — has collapsed. For many young Europeans without inherited wealth, adulthood means drifting from one precarious job to the next, earning barely enough to cover the cost of rent and groceries, let alone start a family. That is, if they find work at all. Meanwhile, they have watched the institutions that were supposed to give them a start in life and cushion its blows — schools, universities, health and youth services — wither under austerity and privatisation. There is no doubt that young people have overwhelmingly borne the brunt of the neoliberal policies pursued over the past decades. That these has driven inequality to new heights is widely acknowledged; what is less often noticed is that this inequality is increasingly drawn along generational lines. Blaming the boomers, however, would be a mistake. They simply had the good fortune to grow up in an era of full employment, affordable housing and decent pensions, and there is nothing scandalous about ageing societies spending more on the old. Moreover, much of that wealth is concentrated in the hands of a small minority of boomers; not all older people live a luxurious life, of course. Ultimately, the problem is not that pensions are too high; it is that the young are being denied what their parents took for granted. The generational divide is simply how a decades-long class war from above is experienced by those who came of age after workers had already lost it, and who inherited a political-economic regime built to transfer wealth upwards. In Europe, that regime has been written into the institutional architecture itself — the euro, the Maastricht treaty, the fiscal rules — which systematically favours asset holders over wage earners, and established workers over new entrants. The mechanisms are well understood. A decade of quantitative easing inflated the property and financial assets held by the old while wages stagnated, locking the young out of home ownership. Labour market reforms — from Italy’s Treu package and Jobs Act to Germany’s Hartz laws and France’s El Khomri law — preserved the security of those already inside while consigning newcomers to a revolving door of temporary and increasingly precarious contracts in the name of “flexibility”. After 2010, austerity fell disproportionately on education, youth services and public investment. Existing pensions were largely shielded, while future ones were quietly cut. As a result, across Europe, government spending on older people has risen, while public investment has been gutted. Then came the pandemic, which cost Gen Z years of schooling, work and social life, followed by a surge in inflation, made worse by an energy shock that Europe’s leaders largely inflicted on themselves. As if that weren’t enough, the young are now being told to accept further cuts and deteriorating living conditions to make room for rearmament and an open-ended war — for which, it seems, there is always money. Read my latest article here: unherd.com/2026/10/why-europ…

Orwell's great observation in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" was that to shrink a person's vocabulary is to shrink his capacity to think. An impoverished version of English removes the mental tools needed to formulate and communicate complex (and dissenting) ideas. Such is the deep, complex relationship between language and thought. We don't read "difficult books" to say that we've read difficult books. We read them because they expand the boundaries of what we are capable of thinking and feeling — we ascend to their level. Vocabulary helps us to recognize truths otherwise beyond our grasp. This revelation is worse than you may think. This must be reversed.

How to Steal a Hemisphere 🌐 Fernando Cerimedo and the Heist of Latin American Democracy Read more on the Reactionary International. buff.ly/BZ3oZ6V

Founded in 1968, the journal Telos brought Critical Theory—Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, et al—to America. More recently, two Telos editors served in the first Trump administration. For @TheIdeasLetter, I explore the journal’s long, strange trip: theideasletter.org/essay/a-j…

With Big 5 publishers pushing AI on authors, agents using AI to screen manuscripts, lit journals rejecting 99% of submissions because editors no longer like to actually edit, and prizes going to AI slop then getting retracted (when the committee isn’t trying to gaslight everyone), writers have no choice but to write for the fun of it and to please themselves. But also: why should we bother submitting anymore?

A pretty bleak article about the lengths Big Five publishers will go to force AI on its authors and staff. I used to believe a contract with one of these companies was the great goal of writing novels. It’s freeing to realize they don’t actually care about literature.

Interview with Cultured Magazine is out culturedmag.com/article/2026…