Oh hey 
echognomics
joined 4 years ago
Apparently Sharts was an American socialist politician and a lawyer who defended 
in court?
Wonder whether the book's actually good. And whether there's some specifically intended political meaning? The blurbs I could find online seems to say that it's historical fiction about the Bar Kokhba revolt, but not sure what statements (if any?) about history/contemporary politics it's trying to make.
Read a comment responding to the April Fools' post saying that Verso is run by trotskyists (specifically their senior editor Sebastian Budgen). So is all this controversy basically part of some obscure ongoing infighting between trots and MLs within left-wing publishing/academia? Not very familiar with industry politics for niche left-wing publishing companies. Is there a particular ideological tendency in contemporary left-wing publishing? (I assume there's a perception of trotskyist-aligned theory having some degree of outsized prominence, what with the memes about trots selling newspapers) Is everything published by Verso considered trotskyist or trotskyist-associated, or are they seen as generally non-sectarian?
Neat. Another book on my reading list...
The Sun-Cross series is the one where a wizard has to escape the Nazis who reverse-isekaied him into our world, right? Was there jewish mysticism in the book? Haven't read it myself but I literally just read a critic describing it as an interesting experiment with/subversion of the portal-quest fantasy subgenre (instead of being directly told about the true nature of the world by reliable wise sage figures (eg. Gandalf, Aslan), the protagonist has to actively question and interpret the world around him to find out the truth (ie. the holocaust)).
: Only the most broken people can be great leaders.
: Stupid commies, don't you realise that violence never achieves anything? Miss me with all that talk of revolutionary collective action; real progressivism is when you vote for nice, intelligent Democrat politicians so that they can bestow upon the American people positive socioeconomic policy changes like NAFTA and the Affordable Care Act.
That worm has just the right number of nipples.
Wait that makes communism sound cool and metal as fuck.
Part of me kinda wish we lived in the fantasy world these people say they believe in, where instead of reading theory and attending party meetings, communists are actually mighty wizard-shamans who gain esoteric mystical powers through constantly doing gay orgiastic rituals, and then use it to summon spirits of the ancestral dead in order to perform crazy magical feats like making entire nation-spanning train networks appear out of mid-air or transmuting arid deserts into dense forests.
Apparently posted, or reposted(?), on weibo by user 帽子载缝苏菲 (or on a meme page with that name? Not familiar with chinese social media) - Sophie Hatter from Howl's Moving Castle.
Not only are Chinese weebs more politically-informed and better posters than their western counterparts, it seems they also have better tastes in anime. 
But there was still lament over the coup and the end of the Soviet Union. Many Russians still hold him responsible for its collapse.
Although a pragmatic and rational politician, Mikhail Gorbachev failed to realise that it was impossible to bring in his reforms without destroying a centralised communist system that millions in the USSR and beyond no longer wanted.
The sheer cognitive dissonance in that final paragraph; reads like some ghoul at the BBC realised halfway through that they were on the verge voicing a mild criticism of the dissolution of the USSR but that just could not be done because of muh "liberal democracy", and had to assure the reader that "everyone hated the USSR, actually; please ignore the previous paragraph and the first 3/4s of this paragraph"
Also notice the awkward use of "many Russians" instead of "many citizens of former Soviet states", because thay wanted to push the Orwellian narrative that the Soviet communism was actually just Russian imperialism.
Checking the sources cited in the wikipedia page, it seems that there may be actual justification for not saying "second wealthiest"? The sentence in question specifically links to a 2015 Reserve Bank of India annual report about percentage of population below the poverty line, not state GDP. The other source, a UN/government think tank index of sustainable development goals, also says that as of 2020 Kerala places 2nd in terms of "No Poverty". So, technically, the data being referred to in this specific case was in relation to poverty rates, not wealth.
However, the second source at the same time positions Kerala in 1st place overall among all other Indian states in terms of sustainable development goals generally. So yeah, someone should maybe go and fix the wikipedia page accordingly.