I also just learned that Leonard Peikoff supported Trump in the recent election. Not a great advertisement for the principles of Objectivism.
This dashboard tracks the availability of popular shadow libraries in real time from a US-based server
James Pogue's excellent reporting on the intellectual far-right always provides little glimmers of insight, though for the most part I still can't quite make sense of Trumpism. In this article he quotes Sumantra Maitra, of The American Conservative saying "It’s between national capital and international capital." I think that summarizes the outlines of the movement, though the appeals to the cultural right (like the anti-immigration or the general racism) seem to have little to do with giving capitalists more power (or more labor to exploit).
"The law of equal liberty is the fundamental precept of liberalism and socialism. Stated in various ways by many thinkers, it can be summarized as the view that all individuals must be granted the maximum possible freedom as long as that freedom does not interfere with the freedom of anyone else."
He got to choose his own fairly unassailable position statements, but I still think Alex did a fantastic job in this.
This is an essay by Jon Trott of Jesus People USA about Jonathon David Brown[1], an audio engineer for Petra (and many other Christian bands), who was a member (and funder) of the KKK and other white identity groups.
The essay goes on to look at some of the racist streams at the heart of evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity; it is long, but worth a skim.
"I’m sure the disinformed and the uninformed were also joined by a large number of misogynists, racists, white supremacists, and Christian nationalists, who truly believe in the program Trump is about to unveil. But a lot of Trump voters just haven’t been paying attention. And that includes a lot of Mormons. I refuse to call them Latter-day Saints, because there is nothing saintly about ignoring everything their religion teaches them, including specific instruction in the D&C about electing “honest men and wise men” and “good men” (D&C 98:10). None of these words describe Trump."
I missed this back when it was published, but just stumbled on it and it is one of the best of the "leftists actually have guns too" type articles I've read.
Thomas Spence (2 July [O.S. 21 June] 1750 – 8 September 1814) was an English Radical and advocate of the common ownership of land and a democratic equality of the sexes. Spence was one of the leading revolutionaries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. He was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814.
Good commentary from Matt Duss, former foreign policy advisor to Senator Bernie Sanders.
"In defending the militarist status quo, Democrats ceded the anti-war lane to Republicans. As they enter the political wilderness, it’s time to reckon with what they got so wrong"
"John Dewey is commonly seen as the liberal philosopher par excellence. But his staunch commitment to democracy put him on a collision course with capitalism."
"You have a culture where you are fifty times more likely to get shot who have somehow convinced themselves that their attitude to guns keep them safer..."
I had to log in to Quora to upvote this one
"The decision not to inform or evacuate nearby civilians about the Trinity test came from the top-down. For Manhattan Project leader Gen. Leslie R. Groves, getting the bomb ready for wartime use in near-total secrecy was crucial and trumped all other considerations. Some Manhattan Project doctors and physicists had attempted to warn Groves and Oppenheimer about the possible exposure risk for surrounding communities"
From the pages of Genesis, which present work as a punishment for Adam’s sin, to the oft-quoted passage in The German Ideology in which Marx announced that in communist society it would be possible, instead of working, "to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind", a healthy mistrust of work is an integral part of our cultural tradition.
Agamben rediscovering Idle Theory: http://endgame.co.uk/idletheory/
Olha Illivna Taratuta (Ukrainian: О́льга Іллівна Тарату́та;[1][a] 1876–1938) was a Ukrainian Jewish anarchist and a founder of the Anarchist Black Cross (ABC).
This thoughtfully anti-anarchist Atlantic article from 1902 (shortly after the assassination of President McKinley) is interesting to read today
"If there is one message I could share with the world, it is this: unless you and your community can determine your way of life, you are living within some form of prison. A carceral system that seeks to control and restrict our potential and imagination. If one of the most brutal dictatorships of the 21st century could crumble in a matter of days, then so too can the capitalist system that dominates and exploits our lives. We must be able to dream of that world, the way my father dreamt of Syria."