A marxian law and policy podcast by the Nonplus Ultra Media Hegemony. First episode premier: Who knows? my friends call me J. you can call me Jason.
Aug 31 • 25 tweets • 7 min read
Whenever the argument between the useless DSA and the even more useless 2nd Int'l LARPers becomes a thing socialists are arguing about on page 1 yet again, I find myself marveling with renewed wonder at how little effort ostensible political activists (among whom I do not...
include myself because organizing is hard, thankless work I hate & am bad at) have put into understanding the nuts and bolts of effective radical political action in the US. The reading list isn't long:
King, ML "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/L…
Aug 17 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
SCOTUS & Title IX: A Short 🧵 on why you should be skeptical about what some miscreants with law degrees have been saying.
First, the holding of Bostock is that gender identity & sexuality discrimination is based on sex, and Title VII prohibits sex discrimination…
2. The Biden administration’s rules on sex discrimination under Title IX do little more than apply the basic reasoning of Bostock to the educational institutions that receive federal funds. In other words, all the education programs that conservatives want to eliminate.
Aug 1 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
In reality we know very little about the sex classes of Lin Yu-Ting or Imane Khelif. Neither of them have disclosed what DSD, if any, they have. The IBA has not stated what the sex test they took was, other than denying it was a measure of testosterone levels. The IOC has …
said that they have high testosterone in a press facing website, according to some reporters. As far as I can tell that’s all we know. We might speculate that the IBA test was for karyotyping, which would be inadequate to determine whether either boxer had physical …
Aug 1 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
What it will take to build a socialist movement in the United States, Part 2: So you think you’re a Leninist, eh Tovarisch? 🧵
Very few people have been as industrious a self-published pontifex maximus as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, AKA Lenin. As a result, there is a lot that might be called “leninism.” Very little of it is worth extended consideration by anyone other than sovietologists. Among his more…
Aug 1 • 14 tweets • 3 min read
What it will take to build a socialist movement in the united states, part 1: some groundwork.🧵
I take a few facts about US government as primitive: The Constitution(big c) has an explicit as well as implicit role in the constitution (small c) of the various institutions by which political power is acquired, distributed, exercised, & retained. That constitution entails…
Jul 24 • 29 tweets • 5 min read
🧵Rather than being “dialectical materialists” comtempory Marxists should recognize the historical contingency of dialectical reasoning & materialist monism. These principles have their place in understanding the history of our tradition of method & theory, but a quarter of the…
way through the 21st c. the extent to which marxism has become indistinguishable from marxology is embarrassing. It’s 100+ years now since Bertrand Russell spotted the crippling dogmatism at the heart of Lenin’s bolshevism that treated Marx’s & Engels’s writings like…
Jul 19 • 30 tweets • 5 min read
People need to stop lying about the supreme court. SCOTUS has decided exactly 7 establishment clause cases since Neil Gorsuch was appointed to replace Scalia. The decisions were:🧵
1. Kennedy v Bremerton School District 597 US __ (2022)
Held that a school district is not required by the establishment clause to prohibit a coach from praying with voluntary participation of student athletes after a game and doing so violates his free exercise & speech rights…
Jul 5 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
“I dont understand what the house of lords is or what it does, or even what the name of the government it is a part of is, but Im going to make fun of it anyway.” is rarely a good strategy if you care to avoid embarrassing yourself.
upper house, but there is at least a logic to the life-peerage & its nomination process (as opposed to hereditary peers, which is an anti-democratic aristocracy the 90a electoral reform notwithstanding) albeit one I am as unpersuaded by as I am by the apportionment method of…
Jul 2 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Its funny to me that people who are quick to trumpet cynicism about politics and the United States government are nevertheless breathless naïfs when some normal operation of lawful power offends their pre-critical devotion to the rule of law. Like, what do you think law is? …
There is literally nothing to it other than a polity using politics to lay out the scope of tolerable activity by its government. If the supreme court says something is the law, that’s what the law is, because that’s what it means for the supreme court to say it. The idea that…
Jul 2 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
The second letter should read: “From the OFFICE of the President of The United States: Hey Clarence my dude, how’s it hanging? Remember what you called your senate confirmation hearings that I chaired? Good times!
Keep on Truckin’!
Your pal,
Joe Biden”
The 3rd Should Read: “From the OFFICE of the President of The United States: Sammy boy! How you doin? 4 USC 8(a), amirite? I gotchyer ‘Extreme danger to life” rightcheer! Take a look at C. of Conduct for J.S.Ct.U.S. Canon 3(B), ya old so & so. ‘Take me to the river!’
Yrs,
Joey B”
Jul 1 • 19 tweets • 3 min read
I would vote for pretty much any Republican candidate if it would block a second Trump administration. Trump pushes boundaries & norms that most politicians would not because he is a fool, a narcissist, and a villain. Sometimes when that happens, like today, it will unavoidably…
alter the fabric of the American constitution, small c. Similar to the criminality of the Nixon admin, Trump’s transgression of unwritten norms of executive power & privilege have placed us beyond a juridical frontier where we have to answer questions that were beyond the pale…
Oct 7, 2023 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
I agree with condemning violence against Israeli civilians. But refusal to condemn the violent ethnic supremacy laws of the Israeli state toward arabs with the same (or stronger) geneaological ties to palestine as the Jewish diaspora have to Israel is racist.
I don't blame either palestinian civilians or native born israeli civilians for their bellicosities towards eachother. What's unconscionable are the way their leaders use those understandable fears as a way to maintain power. But what's even more unconscionable is for people who+
Jun 30, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
They will become less black & Latin only if the elite institutions continue to cater to wealth (as they have done while using racial diversity admissions policies to simulate diverse student bodies). There are all manner of socio-economic characteristics schools could select for
that would offset the racial disparity built into traditional elitist selection criteria. Among them are family composition, parents highest level of education, geography, whether applicants graduated from public or private secondary schools, grandparents & great grandparents...
Jun 12, 2023 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
There are a number of things about Dworkin & McKinnon’s Model Antipornography Civil Rights Ordinance I find puzzling. In the past I've always chocked them up to Dworkin having no legal training so she didn't really have the experience to see the problems w/how its drafted. But...
the more I look at it, and reread Dworkin & MacKinnon’s 1988 defense of the ordinance after it was already dead in the water, us that there seems to be something INTENTIONALLY flawed in it. By that I mean that, aside from the outright misrepresentation of the findings in the...
Jun 12, 2023 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I just did a dive into Anglo-Norman Legal French to try to figure out why the ANF phrase “treinez, pendrez, [decollez], and quarterés” got adopted into Legal English vernacular as “Hanged, Drawn, & Quartered” rather than “Drawn, Hanged, [Beheaded], & Quartered.” the latter is...
the proper order, since “drawn” refers to the dragging of the condemned along the ground by a horse to the place of execution, where they are hanged not as a form of execution but as a form of torture. The actual execution is by beheading (which is specified in the 1397...
Jun 11, 2023 • 15 tweets • 4 min read
So I'm on my second listen to the @TIRShowOakland Patreon only podcast discussing the child accused of murdering another child in Maryland who prosecutors & various yellow journalists have fitted with an oversized Willie Horton Harlequin mask. @J_Myles_TIR talking about his
emotional turmoil, as a father, to his empathic reaction to the impossible confrontation of being a good parent to a child who has just self/inflicted the psychic wound of taking a life; well, I'll just say as an expectant father myself, it kicked me in the guts w/ even more...
Mar 31, 2023 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
Lots of people with lots of opinions about a sealed indictment they haven't read based on evidence presented to grand jury they haven't heard charging him with a crime they don't know the elements of.
Here’s one:
People talk a lot about how the ideological center of SCOTUS has shifted to the extreme right. This is a facile trending toward vapid analysis that is both of the ideological misrepresentations of the federal judiciary by people seeking office in the political branches.
The Martin Quinn score for the median justice continues to hover in the same range it has since the beginning of Rehquists term in 1985 when liberal lions Marshall & Brennan were at their most radical. Justice Brown Jackson has already shown herself to be more liberal than...
Mar 29, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
BRKLN DSA pretend journalist Seth Ackerman thinks real journalism has been improved by social media.
Seth also gets paid by a supposedly socialist magazine that repeatedly calls for the legalization of commercial sexual exploitation & assigned the job... jacobin.com/2023/03/iraq-w…
of describing the post Sanders “future of socialism” to the scion of a payday lending empire who, by her own admission, didn't realize she was a socialist until after she had published her first book on politics.
I am grateful for Seth’s revisionist history of 2003 where
It is not GOOD ENOUGH to have a negative critique of capitalism, liberalism, neoliberalism, “reformism” (whatever that means to you), “revisionism” (likewise), populism, trade unionism, progressivism, or any other programmatic political constituency. ...
Mar 16, 2023 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
I don't know why people take platypus affiliated society seriously. Spencer Leonard told @DougLain “arguably the police are unconstitutional” in the sublation parrot room today, demonstrating in capsule form that he has no qualms about talking out of his ass.
“The left is giving up on the gains of 1776” because of an Oliver Wendell Holmes opinion in 1919 that he largely repudiated and was overturned by bog standard liberals 55 years ago? The guy is just a fucking shitbird.
