The neoliberal dream of fossil fuel billionaire Charles Koch was always the destruction of US democracy and the elimination of government (except for its repressive organs police, courts, prisons, military ofc), and now he has won.
What now? A short 🧵.
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theguardian.com/us-news/2025/f… Charles Koch built the neoliberal economic propaganda and climate denial machine, including the Heritage foundation, Project 25 and the Atlas Network. This is very much his victory, intellectual and strategic. Musk and Trump are simply doing his grunt work.
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So ... this is just one more egregious example of Trump evil, in a whole timeline of them. I cannot imagine what this is doing to Americans facing this tsunami.But awareness and sharing are not enough.
🚨You need to organise.
The only way to resist is by building counterpower ...

https://twitter.com/darbysaxbe/status/1886584910967922973

and counterpower consists of people coming together in joint organisations and campaigns.
1. You should join existing organisations, actively designing and participating in campaigns, not just signing up for a newsletter and donations.
2. You should build your own groups as well.

Too slowly getting out of a depression of the soul, hopefully to be more active, effective and outspoken in 2025. No huge wisdom here. The only way I can reconcile my beliefs and existence in reality is to have a MUCH more grim understanding of humanity - and a MUCH more sublime. I am still working on my "what I read in 2024" blog post (timeliness, eh), but by far the most sobering was learning that genocide is a 'normal' part of human nature, from evidence presented in Christopher Boehm's great "Hierarchy in the Forest." Genocide here is warfare ...

Re ADHD, I just tried one low-dose Concerta pill, given by a friend, and is this how the rest of you feel normally? If this was a normal day for me, I'd have already taken over the world on behalf ecosocialism Napoleon-style. What is your excuse???? Equal parts amazed and upset.

A few on thoughts on Trump II.
1. Trump was ineffective in his first term, because he and his posse knew nothing of govt, and were hampered by their lack of preparation. That's what Project 2025 is about: hitting the ground running with appointees and agenda. It will be worse. 2. People are counting on the courts to reign in illegality in Trump govt operation, but not only does he have the Supreme Court, thanks to some actually organised ppl during his first term, he has filled LOTS of judge positions with his batshit conservative ilk. Don't count ...

Jesus christ. I think I need to turn to alcohol or drugs or therapy or SOMETHING. I had seen the AMOC overturning warnings, but I had not seen this graph. I though somehow mostly the North Atlantic and Europe would be affected, but no, it's global boiling.
en.vedur.is/media/ads_in_h… This is to be ADDED to global warming. I mean, yes, we're talking about Scandinavia, Ireland and the UK freezing. But look at Astralia and South Africa. And India. And West Africa. And Brazil-Argentina. And the US Canada. I mean this is...cataclysmic is a cute word at this point.

Just absolute pits of despair. It's not just the crimes our governments are committing, it's that even "good" media like the @guardian are presenting civilian victims as incidental. No, this is and has been deliberate genocide, with "defence" as a flimsy fig leaf. It's well past time to start from a baseline of assuming Israel knows and wants to inflict the damage it does, rather than assuming some kind of innocent blundering. This is all deliberate, planned, calculated, done very much on purpose. The murder of children, rape of prisoners,

A couple of things.
1. Being able to ratio Ursula Von der Leyen when she commiserates with racist football hooligans, rather than murdered Palestinian children, and expose media misinformation in real time, is a core reason to stay on twitter. This stuff doesn't happen elsewhere. I am not ready to cede this space to the fascists.
2. regarding the misinformation, there is something deeply disquieting about how and why our media is generally failing us, not just on the events of Amsterdam, but in Palestine/Lebanon generally, and climate & ecological crises.

Reading political theory because I must or go even more mad, and this article by Richard Day ... phew.
So much of what we are doing on here is "politics of demand" during an era of accelerating genocide and climate collapse, no less. Unforgivable.

"the politics of demand is by necessity limited in scope: it can change the content of structures of domination and exploitation, but it cannot change their form."

Been wondering all week how Fox managed to outperform pretty much all liberal media in the US on Israeli crimes (especially against fellow journalists). The most jingoistic racist conspiracy-friendly outlet outperformed liberal ones. What does this mean???
A few thoughts.
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https://twitter.com/rafaelshimunov/status/1843695547364061655

This won't be profound or even factual, btw, just I am searching for reasons, because it is a significant development.
1⃣ US news outlets wanted to send their own journalists to Gaza, but were forbidden by Israel. Bias against using reporting by Palestinian journalists led ...
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Fun sidenote to the past year of horror: turns out I have been grinding my teeth so badly, my dentist said my molars are all cracked, likely to develop cavities and I will end up loosing my teeth.
When he told me, I was not at all surprised.
An unrelated 🧵. The thread is actually related, because for the first time in days, my crippling tooth pain has relented a bit. So I get to share some thoughts that have been stewing, from Israel's US & EU-backed genocide to the despondency & weird despair of so many in the climate movement.
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I am reading Hannah Arendt's "On Revolution" prompted by the tremendous Wendy Brown's "In the ruins of neoliberalism" and can I say it is wildly entertaining. She oscillates between being SO DAMN WRONG it causes me to swear loudly in public (*), and so damn insightful ... it is lifechanging in its implications. It's quite the ride. 😂
Wrong side:
* Western thought is the only thought. Gah. Despite the US constitution being inspired by the Iroquois confederation. I swear to god.

One thing that terrifies me is that we have now analysed, understood and NORMALISED our leaders' inaction on climate (and outrageous human rights abuses, including jailing activists). "Don't Look Up" was a brilliant film, but it pushed us along this normalisation trajectory.
🧵1/ Instead, we should be analysing and strategising how to build power and fight back against this inaction, not be satisfied at being nihilistic, smug, righteous commentators of the apocalypse, satisfied with being on the right side of topics, and continually losing.
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Seriously shocking. Not allowed to use a phone, not allowed to replace or operate electronic devices, not allowed to be on social media, not allowed to do journalism. Her stuff ransacked, stolen, or confiscated. Her mother's ashes scattered and lost. Solidarity with @swilkinsonbc

https://twitter.com/Jonathan_K_Cook/status/1830729753709408299

@swilkinsonbc I should add that I have serious political divergences with Sarah Wilkinson, as well as other people mentioned (Medhurst & Murray) regarding their positions on Assad in Syria, Iran, Russia etc. But this behaviour by @UKLabour @Keir_Starmer govt is more akin to Pinochet's ...

One the biggest mistakes we all made was to believe that genocide is abnormal, exceptional, outside range of human behaviour and acceptability.
The contrary is true and has always been true. Once we know and accept that, we can try to organise and act to counter it.
Short 🧵
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https://twitter.com/Rrrrnessa/status/1824406571327033544

TL;DR: read-watch "Exterminate all the brutes."
Slightly longer: in the 2nd half of the 20th century, there was a short time when Western governments and cultures pretended they were against genocide: one in particular, the Holocaust. But before that, they had been for it.
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One aspect missing in the discussion of the causes of the ongoing UK racist violence (gangs roving neighbourhoods looking for non-white people to attack) is the class aspect. UK society is hugely divided by class, in ways other countries are not. You know what class you are in. From what I can see and hear from the testimonies, the majority of the people participating in the racist violence are definitely in the poorer underclasses, the neglected, austerity victims, jobless, in areas that are chronic economic sacrifice zones (the Midlands, North ...).

So... thoughts. This book is great and honestly essential reading for our time. I'll try to loop back around with a chapter-by-chapter selection of strongest points, but am not there yet timewise. But there are some, just a few, flaws, and they are things I care about VERY much.

https://twitter.com/JKSteinberger/status/1815686387451973965

So in case I get run over by a stupid SUV tomorrow, as could happen any day, here are the points I would make in a book.
1. The neoliberal ideology has us convinced we need to f*k other people over to survive, that this is normal. We need to put forward the vision and FACT that

I am completely shaken. The combination of reading Quinn Slobodian on neoliberalism's anti-democratic rampage around the world, and the Chevron decision of the US Supreme Court destroying the ability of the state to regulate industry AT ALL, basically, is so very clarifying. Predatory monsters live among us, mega-profitable industries and their ideologues-enforcers. They have been actively destroying the foundations of democracy to enable their domination of land, water, resources, labour, everything, since the 1950s. Our societies are their prey.

So yesterday we had quite the victory at Uni Lausanne for both the Palestinian rights student movement, and for the university as a whole against political violence & silencing pressure. No time to detail the whole thing, will just add links.
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Image: Keystone/Valentin Flauraud The students won concessions on all 4 of their demands:
1. public university statement of solidarity with Palestinian academics and scholars
2. active support of Palestinian scholars and rebuilding Palestinian academia
3. transparency on collaborations with Israel
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Should have seen this coming, but apparently my building is the first student-occupied pro-Palestinian Uni building in Switzerland. Super proud and going to prepare my courses in a slightly noisier environment than anticipated. 😍😍😍 not sharing pictures because, but right now everything very peaceful, people becoming friends, just sitting, working, talking. Some lucky folks moved a couch in, sitting pretty.
Ah was for colleague with crutches.

Some recent pro-Palestinian tweets went viral, so I got to be exposed to pro-Israeli accounts, some real people, some trolls. And they exhibit behaviour I remember from the good (not good) days of Holocaust denial in Europe in the 1980s. A short 🧵 which will please no one.
1/ The "argument" has four phases.
1⃣ Denial. The bad stuff didn't happen, isn't credible, isn't plausible, wasn't that bad really.
2⃣ Justice. But, if it did happen, the victims had it coming to them. They were the bad guys, they did bad things, they deserved it for sure.
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