Five Habits of Highly Annoying Online Liberals

Dedicated to the memory of Will Stancil.

  1. Obviously the president cannot do X, he doesn’t have the political capital/votes/the Supreme Court. Your average online liberal is very big on making excuses for why it’s just not possible for the Democrats to do anything, but very sure that more, harder voting next time will solve the problem. That this strategy hasn’t worked the last six presidential elections won’t stop them from making more excuses next time.
  2. But the parliamentarian says we cannot do this. The online liberal is very strict on rules when those rules prevent Democrats from achieving anything. Rules need to be obeyed, no matter how nonsensical and attempts to get around them are just wrong. That the president breaks not just rules, but the law on a daily basis by say supporting the genocide in Gaza somehow always escapes their attention. Rules are sacred and it would be wrong to break or ignore them, regardless the outcome. Sportsmanship is everything.
  3. But if we abolish the filibuster, we cannot use it ourselves when Trump gets into power again.. The online liberal is not so keen on trying to fix the whole broken political system, but rather worries endlessly about what the GOP might do if we change anything. The filibuster being the most well known example, but there’s also e.g. the blue slip procedure. If a senator objects to a proposed judicial candidate in their state, they can send a blue slip to the responsible committee and as a courtesy that candidate will be removed. Something the Republicans paid no attention to whatsoever when they lead these committees, but the Democrats keep adhering to.
  4. But the Supreme Court will strike it down anyway so this is pointless. The online liberal loves to capitulate before the fight. In that they resemble their leaders, who are also not keen to start anything that might require more effort than sending out fund raising emails. The filibuster is a good example of this, as this is always brought up as an example of why we can’t have nice things. But did you know that the modern filibuster consists of nothing more than some junior staffer sending an email that their boss would filibuster if a bill is brought to a vote? No effort required at all. Considering the laziness of your average senator, that Democrats do not call this bluff is inexcusable, but understandable considering the laziness of your average senator.
  5. Vote Blue no Matter Who. Or, it doesn’t matter that Biden supports genocide, Trump is worse so it’s imperative that you vote for him regardless of what he does. Don’t put pressure on Democrats to change, you don’t want the Republicans to get in, do you? Also seen in the UK, where the usual bunch of centrist muppets had spent the last half decade describing most Labour voters as antisemitic scum who should disappear, but still expect their votes. The online liberal expects the voters to adjust to their politicians, not the other way around. The online liberal therefore will always scold the voter for expecting their elected leaders to listen to their concerns.

Open Access books at Pluto Press

Pluto Press, one of the older radical anticapitalist publishers in the world, has made a selection of their published work available as Open Access books:

With the aim of accessibility and in the spirit of knowledge-sharing, a selection of our books is available to download through Open Access programmes. Here you can find links to the books on the OAPEN website, and on other platforms, where you can download electronic copies for free.

For anybody interested in leftwing, radical politics, history and theory this is a great resource.

Transphobia costs you votes, UK edition

There was a local byelection in Hackney yesterday, necessary because one of the existing Labour councillors had been elected as mayor there earlier. And that election had been necessary because the existing mayor turned out to be shacking up with a convicted pedo. A bit of a mess already therefore, which makes it weirder that Hackney Labour decided to double down on the weird sex pest angle by putting forth a transphobe as candidate who compared trans women to actors doing blackface. When that surfaces, she got suspended, then unsuspended again just the day before the election. How that worked out? About as well as you could expect.

Tories win the ward with a 30 percent swing from Labour

It shows once again how transphobia plays on the doorstep: badly. Ordinary voters just do not care for the sort of obsessive weirdo who likes ‘womanface’ memes. It’s the hight of Labour arrogance to think that they could stand this canidate when the Tories had as theirs a well respected ex-LibDem councillor with actual ties to the local community. And with Labour nationally also seemingly embracing transphobia, this may be a sign that the parliamentary elections next year may be a lot closer than they expect…

So I moved house

To finally get enough room for my books.

A view from the hallway of my library, showing book cases on three sides, stacked with books.

This is why I haven’t posted since November. Ever since the pandemic normalised working from home I have been thinking about moving back to my hometown. With my parents in their mid-seventies and especially my mother having had a couple of nasty accidents, I wanted to move nearer to my family, most of whom live in the same city. Early last year I decided to get serious about it and started looking for a house to buy. Several false starts later and I found one less than 500 metres away from my parents. Bought it, then had several months of doing all the boring bureaucratic stuff to get a mortgage and get all the various utilities up and running, not to mention arraigning a moving company to get all those books (over 150 boxes ultimately) here. Which left no time and little energy for posting once I could finally move in mid-Novemeber. Sorry.

I have been so very lucky with all this. The apartment I had bought with Sandra back in 2005 sold after literally a week of being listed on Funda, for more money than it cost to buy the house I got here. Originally the idea had been to move all my crap out into storage, renovate and repaint everything before selling it but that never came together and instead it was sold as is. Maybe I could’ve gotten a couple of thousand more for it, but what I got for it was already literally three times what I paid for it, so no point in being greedy.

It has all been stressful but I cannot complain. I now have a house I don’t see myself moving out of ever again, I’m close to where the family is and as a bonus, I can buy new books again without worrying about where to put them.