Aloof Liberty

Looking at the world through imperfect lenses.

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@heelvsbabyface Fuck their gender ambiguity

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@juliew38138 @DataRepublican Mickey was the cutest puppy I have ever seen. He still draws a crowd. Mickey usually votes for the Greens, but I’ve convinced him to vote Republican this time.

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@juliew38138 @DataRepublican

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@JGAnno24 For the good of the world, we should consider donating. 🤪

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@ur_fave_dahlin 🙏🏻

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@JayViperTV 1974

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@JayViperTV 1974

[Krzysztof Szczawinski 🇵🇱 @Kristof_Poland]

Barack Obama – The Most Complete Product of the Long March – The Community Organizer Who Became President.

He is not the villain of this story either. He is its most gifted protagonist.

The son of a Kenyan economist and a Kansas anthropologist, raised partly in Indonesia and partly in Hawaii; community organizer in Chicago; president of the Harvard Law Review; Illinois state senator; U.S. senator; President of the United States at 47.

The American story working exactly as advertised – and simultaneously the most complete illustration of the Gramscian pipeline ever produced.
Not a contradiction.
The same thing.

1. He studied and taught the Alinsky method. Not metaphorically – literally.
In Chicago in the 1980s, Obama worked as a community organizer in an environment deeply shaped by Saul Alinsky’s organizing tradition. He taught workshops on the Alinsky method and learned the mechanics of organizing: identify interests, build relationships, develop leaders, acquire power, and use organization to turn local grievances into political force. He knew the manual. He taught the manual. He then applied it at national scale – which is either the most remarkable career progression in American political history or the most complete proof of concept the Long March ever produced. Probably both.

2. The rhetorical genius was real.
"Yes We Can." "Hope and Change." "We are the ones we have been waiting for."
The ability to speak the language of unity while practicing the politics of organization – Alinsky’s politics of conflict and organization wrapped in the aesthetics of reconciliation. The form was post-partisan. The content was the most disciplined ideological project since Reagan – except Reagan was trying to dismantle the administrative state and Obama was building it. The speeches made you feel the argument was over. The argument was just beginning.

3. The Nobel Prize, awarded eight months into his first term – for nothing yet done – is the most complete illustration of cultural hegemony in modern political history. The performance of the correct identity, the correct values, and the correct aesthetic was sufficient, before any policy, to generate the highest international recognition available. The prize was not for what he had done. It was for what he represented. Which is precisely the point – and precisely what Gramsci had theorized seventy years earlier.

4. The institutional transformation was the substance beneath the aesthetics. Eight years produced the expansion of the administrative state into every corner of American life, the installation of a generation of ideologically aligned officials throughout the federal bureaucracy, the transformation of the regulatory apparatus, the use of executive action to achieve what legislation could not. The ratchet, applied at presidential scale. A subsequent administration could change the direction but not undo the installation – because the people installed remained, in the civil service, the judiciary, the regulatory agencies, doing what they had been placed there to do.

5. He understood, better than any politician since Reagan, that politics is culture before it is policy. The campaign was a cultural event – the logo, the fonts, the rallies, the language, the sense that something larger than politics was happening. He didn’t win because of policy positions. He won because he had changed what felt possible – and what felt possible changed what people were willing to vote for. This is Gramsci applied to electoral politics: shift the cultural assumptions first, and the political victories follow as confirmation rather than cause.

6. The luxury beliefs were structural. Harvard Law. University of Chicago. Net worth approximately seventy million dollars after leaving office. Homes in Washington, Martha’s Vineyard, and Hawaii. The man of the people who became the establishment – whose policies on immigration, criminal justice, and education were most costly for the working-class communities he had organized in Chicago. And then there is the habit of describing yourself as the challenger long after you have become the establishment. The outsider rhetoric maintained from the most powerful office in the world. It is not hypocrisy exactly – it is the organizer’s grammar surviving the organizer’s promotion. The language was learned in Chicago in the 1980s and never updated, because it still worked, and because the audience it worked on never noticed the distance between the speech and the address.

7. The honest assessment: he was extraordinarily good at what he did. The question is what he did. He took the Alinsky manual, the Gramscian strategy, the Frankfurt School’s cultural framework, and synthesized them into the most electorally successful progressive project in American history. He didn’t design the long march. He was its most gifted product – and its most effective accelerant. The institutions he found captured, he left more captured. The Overton Window he found shifted, he left shifted further.

What he built – or rather, what he accelerated and consolidated – did not depend on him personally. The officials installed remain. The regulatory architecture expanded. The cultural assumptions shifted. The pipeline filled with people who wanted to be him and learned, from watching him, exactly how it was done.

The most complete product of the long march became its most effective teacher.

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

today watch dsp project 7 and make video project shellven carlisnail https://t.co/YcevyyWVYS via @YouTube

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@GundamIsHere I didn’t know Hasan was friends with Dylan Mulvaney.

[Phil Magness @PhilWMagness]

There's a deeper problem with Vance's historical narrative here.

He claims that the Industrial Revolution caused a crisis of "inequality" that made the rich even richer, and sparked a backlash in the form of Marxist political responses.

This is false on two counts:

1. The Industrial Revolution drastically *reduced* inequality. It displaced medieval serfdom where wealth was concentrated among the nobility and the masses were poor. And as the Industrial Revolution progressed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a new middle class emerged, meaning the income distribution spread more widely than at any point in history up until then. This is just an empirical fact that Vance is wrong about.

2. Industrialization did NOT cause Marxist political revolutions in response. In fact, almost all of Karl Marx's predictions about the course of industrial development turned out to be wrong. Marx predicted a coming immiseration of the working classes as capital concentration reduced laborers to subsistence and exploitative extraction...which in turn triggers the revolution. By the early 20th century, it was so obviously clear that this was not happening that Marx's followers began to "revise" his theories to account for the failed predictions. That only changed after 1917 when the Bolsheviks imposed Marxism at gunpoint after staging a violent coup in Russia, one of the least-industrialized powers on earth at the time. The Bolsheviks tried to spread their revolution in Europe in the years that followed, but it failed every time.

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@JGAnno24 Time to take his most valuable cards down to Shane’s. I wonder if he can get 40% of the value given by his app.

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@ThatBeing_Said Factually accurate statement.🤡

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@JGAnno24 I think DSP is implying that Lady Detractors are on steroids. 😀

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@JGAnno24 DSP seemed overly concerned during Sunday night’s slow stream. The concern was shown again near the beginning of Monday’s pre-stream. Just one slow stream. The financial walls are closing in.

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@DoodyStreams 💪😀

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@H_Bombfp637 I think DSP’s apparently detailed memory is just the result of retconning everything, all the time, every day.

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@RupertLowe10 @TRobinsonNewEra Stop scolding adults like children. Standing around bleating like sheep has gotten your nation in this mess. Time to roar like a lion.

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@TheRealDashFir1 That guy 💀

[Aloof Liberty @KenBr80]

@poems_past It feels like there was some coordination tonight. It’s very unusual to have more than one aggressive dent in Kick chat. Tonight there were several and they were feisty even before the tip was received.