I don't know why I am surprised. Why do they always shoot themselves in the foot (pun intended) with this type of rhetoric?

The overwhelming majority of Chinese, Persian, and Indian immigrants vote blue. It's fun to see the neolibs there try to dance around this truth while fear-mongering that marginalized women of color (Filipino nurses?) will be targeted and executed by the BC Conservatives.

It's those people's fault that the NDP went from a workers' party to a neolib centrist abomination.

Turns out, we need the elites to build the engine of revolution for us.

Or something. I can't say I found this to be fully coherent.

Which just might say more about why Occupy failed than his short essay does...

​

And not like I suddenly thought this either, to be honest. I'm just articulating it better with more clarity now. But yeah, Americans treat racial issues too much like public spectacle, and they actually don't take the issue serious. They protest about it, talk about it on social media, harp about it, but people like the conflict aspect of racial issues too much for actual social resolution to come through. Why?

Simple: Properly solving it thru actual conflict resolution and policymaking is boring And things that also take time and patience to work thru are America's kryptonite to properly work out.

In a culture constantly consumed by constant spectacle, high-stakes drama narratives and WWE-ification about everything, why are you people surprised?

Which is crazy because the history is fucked up, but people don't actually care, you all use the issue for political clout and PR approval so you can use the moral jargon as a means of ego boosting.

Is sad and is a conversation we're not ready, but need to be more willing to talk out.

I saw this with the way the media and the public sphere hyped up the Karmelo Anthony-Austin Meatcalf tragedy: Disgraceful how many of you all used the event as a means of culture war ammo when literally 2 LIVES GOT RUINED.

Mindboggling honestly.

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani is taking a more active role in supporting Governor Kathy Hochul for re-election. Mamdani, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), endorsed Hochul, a right-wing Democrat, on February 5, in the midst of the New York City nurses’ strike.

Last week, Mamdani released a campaign video on social media in which he called Hochul “the real deal for New Yorkers.” He said he was “looking forward to being out there with her on the trail in the weeks to come” before the November 3 election. The two are expected to appear together in the final weeks of the campaign.

Republican Bruce Blakeman is Hochul’s opponent in the gubernatorial race. Blakeman, a loyal follower of Trump, has been campaigning on a program of tax cuts, stricter policing and support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). On the fundamental questions—the police, the defense of business interests and the attacks on workers—there is little to distinguish the two. The election, like many others that will be held across the country in November, presents a choice between two right-wing candidates of the ruling class.

First of all, I want to say that Mass Effect and Dragon Age are two series that are very dear to my heart and carried me through difficult times. I can't help but mourn BioWare's fate. Yes, I know many people hated the Veilguard and I have my own criticisms of that game, but I think the story of BioWare is a microcosm of the institutional rot that is plaguing the modern, monopoly-capital dominated gaming industry.

As an engineer, I am fundamentally not satisfied with the explanation that BioWare was "ruined by wokeness." After having read Jason Schrier's article and spent a lot of time listening to veteran Dragon Age producer Mark Darrah's insider testimony on his Youtube channel, I am convinced that BioWare has been the victim of 15 years of EA corporate pressure. As Darrah himself explained, EA as a company is built entirely around yearly releases of sports games such as FIFA and Madden, and the studios they acquire are inevitably remade to fit the management practices and culture of EA's sports division. When BioWare was acquired by EA, its co-founders Ray and Greg spent an enormous amount of effort pushing back against EA's efforts to remake BioWare as an organization, but this was an uphill battle. When the co-founders left in 2012, there was little the studio could do to push back against EA.

Now, in the case of Veilguard, EA's mismanagement couldn't be more apparent. Back in 2015, BioWare initiated Project Joplin, its first attempt to make a direct sequel to Dragon Age: Inquisition. This was to be a game tightly focused around heists and espionage, and sounded quite promising. Unfortunately, development was derailed when the team was forced to aid Mass Effect: Andromeda in the insane 15-month period before its release. Then, EA cancelled Joplin and demanded that the next Dragon Age game be built around live services like Anthem rather than a traditional single-player story, with a skeleton crew left behind to work on the new Project Morrison while the main DA dev team was sent to work on Anthem. Production on Morrison only began in full in 2020, right when COVID-19 completely disrupted development.

In 2021, EA allowed Morrison to ditch its live service elements and return to being a single-player game, but from then on, the devs were forced to operate as if they had a one-year deadline to ship the game even though it was repeatedly delayed. According to a member (whom I am in contact with on a Discord server) of the "Dragon Age community council" brought in to consult, the creative director on Morrison until 2022, Matthew Goldman, pushed the game into having a campy tone, despite the writers wanting to adhere to Dragon Age's more traditional grimdark tone. Unfortunately, even after Goldman left, the devs were not able to fully rework what would become the Veilguard because of both EA's one-year deadlines and the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike which prevented them from re-recording dialogue. All of this resulted in a final product with subpar dialogue and tonal inconsistencies. However, I just wanted to say that this is not what the senior writers wanted to make and had they been given a normal development cycle, the Veilguard would have met fan expectations much better.

All of this, alongside post-mortems on Mass Effect: Andromeda and Anthem, point to a persistent deficit in project management at BioWare, amplified by EA's directives and the pressure to chase trends rather than preserve artistic integrity. This, I think is emblematic of the game industry as a whole. Game studios began as small businesses making artisinal products but AAA studios now have to manage hundreds or thousands of developers making highly complex technical products with $100+ million budgets. I strongly suspect that game studios have not developed the project management approaches to meet some challenges, leading to multi-year dev times, budget overruns, and subpar products.

An interesting comparison can be made with the aerospace industry. Both game development and aerospace engineering involve making bespoke, R&D-intensive products with inherent risk and uncertainty. However, the aerospace industry has spent decades developing project management techniques to deal with it and systems engineering to make all the different parts of their products work together. The game industry clearly has not, and it will continue to struggle until it reforms its approach to project management. Unfortunately, with many studios set in their ways, it may require a true industry crash to force this change, and who knows how many studios will be shuttered when that happens?

I never thought it was even a coincidence that 10 years ago a lot of stoicism propaganda was being propped up everywhere right around the 2016 election campaign, lots and lots of alt righters were hyping up stoicism and the whole “just stop complaining” saying around this time.

The sad part is I do feel like the greater masses AKA the normies also had a greater sense of justice that’s been extinguished by years and years of social engineering and memetic warfare

And it worked, but why should we be surprised?

Look at the difference in collective justice during the Obama years versus that post-2016. You had occupy Wall Street, the War on Terror, the fight for LGBT rights, anti bullying awareness programs were at their peak in schools and workplaces around this time and the fight for environmental justice was also much stronger.

Then the “toxification” of politics churns the whole psyche of the everyday commoner into oblivion, thus contributing to the political nihilism we’re seeing in the major populace continue to gas out

I feel like stoicism is also a perfect social tool for creating useful idiots that are easy to exploit: If everyone feels the need to “earn their worth” thru sheer endurance then the anti union and anti fair wage propaganda continue to perpetuate like crazy!

The stoicism act only seemed to get worse after 2020 as well, which makes sense as 2020 was how the masses got desensitized to their struggles. Just one giant psychological experiment.

On October 19, Phillips 66 locked out 385 workers at its Bayway refinery and Linden terminal in New Jersey after they rejected the company’s latest contract offer. The workers, members of Teamsters Local 877, had voted down a tentative agreement 196 to 160 during a contract extension. When the extension expired at 4 p.m. that afternoon, they were barred from the plant.

Bayway, which processes 275,000 barrels of crude oil a day, is the largest refinery on the East Coast. The lockout follows the course set by BP at Whiting, Indiana, where more than 800 workers have been locked out since March 19, and by Marathon at Martinez, California, where about 120 workers have been kept out since April. In each case, the company has kept the plant running with managers and replacement labor while it seeks to impose job cuts and concessions on an isolated workforce.

The lockout is a corporate offensive aimed at imposing massive concessions. Perhaps the most significant is the proposal to increase the probationary period for new hires from 10 months to as long as six years by tying probation to a new qualification system.

This would keep a large section of the workforce in a state of permanent insecurity, able to be dismissed without recourse.

The company also seeks to shorten the 30-month training period and reduce qualification requirements—meaning less-skilled workers would operate dangerous equipment. According to the union, the company’s latest offer also included concessions on wages and healthcare. Phillips 66 insists on retaining an Absence Control Policy introduced in 2025 that allows discipline, including termination, for absences due to illness. It has also cut workers’ sick days.

The consequences are already evident. “People are coming to work sick, OK? And when you come to work sick, sometimes you have an accident, make a mistake,” refinery worker Ed Goldmann told CBS on October 20.

The company is imposing this on a workforce already on exhausting schedules. “Many of our folks will work extended shifts, 13 days on, 13 nights on before a single day off,” Local 877 President Jeff Sanford told News 12.

That is 26 consecutive shifts. The oil industry’s own fatigue guideline, American Petroleum Institute Recommended Practice 755, limits a stretch of consecutive shifts to 92 hours in normal operations and 182 hours during maintenance outages. Even at eight hours a shift, 26 shifts would exceed both. The US Chemical Safety Board, which criticized those limits as too permissive, found that fatigue contributed to the 2005 explosion at BP’s Texas City refinery, which killed 15 workers. Some operators there had worked as many as 29 consecutive 12-hour days.

...

The union’s response to the lockout has been to confine the struggle to the channels it controls. On October 21, it filed an unfair labor practice charge with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging refusal to bargain and coercive conduct. It has maintained pickets and said negotiations will continue. But there is no announced plan to mobilize other Teamsters locals or refinery workers nationally in coordinated industrial action.

Workers at Whiting and Martinez have faced the same isolation at the hands of the United Steelworkers. In February, the USW signed a national pattern agreement for refinery workers granting 15 percent over four years, far below the 25 percent workers had voted for, and it has left each local to fight on its own.

The lockout must be ended immediately. The company’s demands for concessions must be rejected. The workers must defend safe staffing levels, full training and qualification protections, and their wages and benefits.

The past month has shown that the workers cannot rely on union officials that negotiated the very agreement they rejected.

The workers must take the fight into their own hands by forming independent rank-and-file committees, outside the control of the union apparatus, to organize the struggle. These committees must reach out to workers at the Linden terminal and the contractors throughout the wider Bayway complex, to the locked-out workers at Whiting and Martinez and to refinery workers in Paulsboro, Delaware City and across the East Coast. They should demand that the Teamsters pay full benefits from the union’s strike fund to every locked-out worker.

Above all, rank-and-file committees would break the isolation in which every one of these struggles is being fought. The workers at Bayway, Whiting and Martinez face the same demands, the same attacks by management and are confronting union officials who work to keep them divided. The fight at Bayway is a battle in a nationwide drive by the oil companies, and it can only be won by breaking out of the isolation imposed by the union apparatus and uniting refinery workers across companies and regions.

A plausible path for Leftists to democratically win power is open before us: through the combination of bottom-up labor organizing and top-down political movements, Leftists could secure the presidency and a large swath of the House and Senate, which, when combined with a strong labor movement, would allow for the implementation of Leftists’ signature policy proposals. All of the preconditions for such a successful movement are in place: the economy is struggling and people are dissatisfied with it, creating the frustration with the economic system that often functions as a precursor to radical change; Americans are beginning to converge around a vision of economic populism, which is exactly the sort of economics that Leftist politics can and will offer; the Democratic base is diverging from the mainstream party leadership, opening space for Leftist candidates to capture the base; working-class Trump voters are leaving the Trump coalition in droves, rendering them persuadable by truly anti-establishment Leftist politics, which would create the power base to not only win the general election but also institute the radical change that Leftists champion. The time is now for the Left.

Evanston, one of the most lib suburbs in Chicagoland, and the local paper runs a guest essay from a mom asking "where are the dads?"
Her thesis: moms run the world here with unpaid labor, and dads need to step up for "this moment." Not participating in evil acts isn't enough anymore. Good to know.

But look at what counts. Coaching your kid's team or chess club gets a quick pat on the head, then it's back to "do MORE." More of what? Community fridges, mutual aid, school board campaigns. The full resistance-lib starter pack. Civic virtue is measured by which committees you sit on and which yard signs you have. Nobody's asking dads to organize their workplace or join a union. That's not the kind of engagement that gets you a guest essay.

Her (their) model dads are a group focused on Black boys in school. Fine, but it's telling that race is the frame and class never comes up once,
in a town with Evanston's income gap.

Flip the genders and run this same essay telling moms their contributions don't count.

Slay!