He was targeted and kicked out by the neolibs because they were terrified of him leading Labour to victory, buddy. "Overt and unrestrained antisemitism"? You are clearly a troll. Starmer kicked MPs out of Labour for showing up with Leftist movie director Ken Laoch. It's ridiculous. Starmer's anti-Leftist Labour will drive people to right-wing populists, just like Macron in France.
Fuck Corbyn? Dude's a hero and exactly what's needed. Peddle your trash elsewhere
Edit: Adding this link from an actual Leftist publication. Taking him down was a hatchet job pure and simple. Starmer is the devil and his only job is to keep any significant change to the economic order from occurring.
https://jacobin.com/2020/10/jeremy-corbyn-labour-party-suspension-starmer
"The report found that Labour’s processes for handling antisemitism complaints were lacking. Its structures were too weak, they were subject to political pressures, under-resourced, and lacked proper guidance. Its staff had not had access to appropriate training. The most damning finding — of harassment — related to two cases where representatives of the party, former mayor Ken Livingstone and a Lancashire councillor, had made antisemitic comments. The report criticized the Corbyn leadership for its lack of effectiveness in dealing with these matters, but it did not make sweeping claims about their complicity in antisemitism.
"Jeremy Corbyn’s response to the report was equally sober. He acknowledged the report’s criticisms, encouraged the swift implementation of its findings, and offered an apology to Jewish members whose complaints had been mishandled. “Jewish members of our party and the wider community were right to expect us to deal with it,” he said, “and I regret that it took longer to deliver that change than it should.”
"As one would expect, he also defended his record. Many of the processes criticized, Corbyn pointed out, predated his leadership — something which the report itself acknowledges — and were replaced by more robust procedures after 2018. He didn’t accept all of its findings, but that is hardly a surprise for a critical report running to 129 pages that dealt with such a controversial topic."
I'm all for it and hopeful. For the first time I'm beginning to feel that there's a real chance that even the US could move towards a General Strike before too long in response to how drastically conditions are collapsing across the board.
N & G is one I have not read by Hesse, and I can say the same for The Iron Heel in regards to London. I have really enjoyed both authors though I haven't read them in a long time. Cheers for the recommendations.
I'll second Long Walk to Freedom. While I think it's a book that everyone can profit from reading, if you have interest in that subject I think it's a no-brainer.
Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell
I've been reading such a long list of rave reviews from authors like Kazuo Ishiguro and Alan Moore and publications like the LA Review of Books as well as hearing the same from close friends that I finally bumped this book to the top of my backlog stack.
It's a horror book set in the early '80s in Argentina, weaving the kind of mystical conspiracy of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum or Pérez-Reverte's The Club Dumas and Ninth Gate novels over and through the very real state terrorism of the Argentinian Junta's Dirty War. I'm only about 75 pages into the 600 or so, and the slow-burn opening is just now starting to unfold into something more overtly disturbing, but the deceptively simple/basic prose creates a remarkably sophisticated and subtle story that is creeping into me like magic. Disturbing magic, lol.
Highly recommend.
That's hot. Also I hadn't realized Dylan Dog was still going. 367, wow. I feel like rewatching Cemetary Man.
As long as the Democratic Party is run by the same neoliberal establishment there will be a place for grotesque sociopaths like her and Terry McAuliffe. Thank you for remembering that she played a key part in stealing the 2016 primary from Sanders as laid out in "the emails!!!" that everyone likes to pretend didn't contain anything horrible.
As long as the Democratic Party is run by the same neoliberal establishment there will be a place for grotesque sociopaths like her and Terry McAuliffe. Thank you for remembering that she played a key part in stealing the 2016 primary from Sanders as laid out in "the emails!!!" that everyone likes to pretend didn't contain anything horrible.
New Scientist is the name of the excellent publication that Tom Gault's awesome comic appears in.
https://www.newscientist.com/author/tom-gauld/
New Scientist is not the name of the comic. @NewScientist is not the comic strip itself but the publication as a whole.
What a tough question to answer, stretching all the way back to Atari 2600 for me.
I think I'll pick No Mercy/Virtual Wrestling Pro 2 on the N64. Possibly thousands of hours both solo and competitive at a friends with some incredible round robin tournaments with up to five participants. Just amazing Create A Wrestler and one of my handful of favorite gameplay mechanics ever. Also we were paying during the exciting days of pro wrestling so we had that enthusing us as well.
I played it on a 2019 Macbook Pro about two years ago now and oof, it was unsurprisingly rough. Probably unplayable, but through stubbornness I managed to make it through that first chapter available in early access. At the time I got it on Steam, I thought I'd be able to play it via GeForce NOW but then Google went an snapped it up and made it exclusive for Stadia. So instead I downloaded it to the Mac and suffered through crap resolution and crappier frame rates.
I just got a new M2 MBP after my old one went tits up on me and downloaded the game again to see how things are different and holy moly, it plays great at full resolution with most settings maxed out. Go Apple Silicon, and especially go Larian! Thank you so much for doing a native Mac version. I'd much rather play it this way than on the PS5. We've already got four ready to party up in online co-op with the new classes and races when the official release happens.
All 6000-ish of it lol. I'd been registered user for close on five years and I only made use of it for a couple more before that. But boy did Reddit help me out in a variety of ways small and big. And helped me waste time. Some would say too much time. Some would be right.
I deleted my content two and a half weeks ago in one big, automated purge and I've been waiting and watching and stamping out the occasional zombie content reappearing from the dead. I haven't seen any in a couple of days and today is a good day to die. This was much sadder than axing Twitter or Facebook (Freedom! Horrible, horrible freedom!)
I don't know how my experience with kbin will shake out, but I'm honestly looking forward to trying to contribute more and be more thoughtful, careful, interesting, in whatever ways that I can. That's the intention I'm starting with.
Alas, poor Reddit, I knew ye well-ish? It was a tough choice.
Agreed. I love Discovery, despite/because/whatever the occasional cheese and the overflow of Michael's tears. I really enjoyed the fact that they went what some people want to belittle under the term woke. To me, they went empathetic, emotionally healthy. Not using emotional immaturity to create artificial, clumsy plot suspense through the characters acting foolishly/immaturely. It's the Federation... they 100% are woke. Empathy and understanding and patience are qualities they'd prioritize to succeed both as a civilization and at smaller scale a crew, and it's nice to see the characters act accordingly. I get enough toxic stupidity in my daily contemporary life. It's nice to dream about humans improving in wisdom. Thanks, Discovery.
I loved Cloud Cuckoo, I really didn't care for Seveneves (and I actively disliked Termination Shock... it's been a progression but I do believe my taste and Neal Stephenson have finally cleanly diverged), and Ioved The Overstory, though yeah, I agree that I think it ultimately was drawn out. I read it while on a big plant, tree, fungus and mycorrhizal kick, reading lots of books on the possibility of plant sensation/communication/cognition.
I ended up loving Ministry. The way it was written felt like it was putting together moments to evoke more of a history of events rather than developing a rich narrative around a few characters. The individual human characters were less important than the development of official and non-official policy that grew through the book, seeing how it all might happen. It really worked for me in this case.
I read it a few months after having read Stephenson's Termination Shock, which I really didn't care for. I feel like his dialogue and sensibilities about characters and society haven't really moved since the early 90s, except to get progressively more weirdly monarcho-libertarian. I think I'm finally done picking up his new books out of habit.
Fair enough. The pacing was definitely unconventional.
Tchaikovsky's output is kind of stunning, especially given just how good I find so much of his stuff, how memorable. "We're going on an adventure!"
I started with The Player of Games and that was a great way for me. I think that was when it actually came out, so it's been a while since I read that series but I absolutely loved it.
I wasn't crazy about The Expanse with the first book but it just kept growing on me and ended up one of my very favorites. And the same thing happened with the tv adaption. Truly amazing.
Moving over from Reddit, I don't want to just lurk here, so I thought I'd introduce myself by mentioning the last science fiction novels I read along with how I enjoyed them. I just reread what I wrote and I believe they are spoiler-free, though I may be corrected on that point.
I just finished Translation State by Ann Leckie, and overall I'd say that I enjoyed it. Interesting characters and alien species (particularly the Presger) told at an interesting pace that eschewed typical action-centric plotting. My one real complaint was that the last quarter of the book felt like it ran into a wall for me, forcing the characters suddenly into a restricted space that felt like it was all about placing the various characters into different combinations to force the dialogues that the author wanted to happen before the end of the book. That felt clumsy to me and I found myself tempted to skip pages.
A few books before that I had read Titanium Noir by Nick Harkaway. I have a long history with hardboiled/noir fiction and the sci-fi variants, but I have tended to avoid it for a long time just because I grew tired of it through overexposure. But between how much I enjoyed Harkway's Gnomon and the rave reviews for Titanium Noir this was an easy pick-up and I'm glad I did pick it up, because I loved it and was driven to finish it in a few reads. Harkaway does an exceptional job of creating his own hardboiled atmosphere and characters, coming up with his own spin on the trope-y patois made relevant to its particular setting and wrapping it all around an excellent investigation into where our haves vs have-nots society is heading with his concept of Titans. Not a long read, but a particularly enjoyable one. I see how it could easily turn into sequels, but personally I'm really happy for this to be a terrific one-and-done.
A few books before that was Adrian Tchaikovsky's Infinity Gates. I think I'm not alone in saying that his Children of series is among my favorite science fiction of all time. I haven't read anything else by him that I was into until this. It's not conceptually as amazing as the Children of books (for me at least), but I found it a good actiony yarn that has a fresh and very neat spin on the now-tired multiverse concept, something which also allows it to avoid needing to come up with some broken explanation for ftl travel so it could have radically different settings and species.
A handful of books before that one, my next-previous sci fi read was the remarkable A Half-built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys, which is really stellar science fiction by my tastes. Great and big ideas in regards to aliens, gender and climate response, bringing both Butler's Xenogenesis and Robinson's Ministry for the Future strongly to mind though not in any way aping them. In fact I think Emrys one-upped Robinson in respect to her incorporation of how the tech of social networks and communications might evolve (including using AI/algorithms responsibly to support the mechanisms rather than guide them) and be used to form non-state governance, mutualism and corporate resistance centered around dealing with climate change and environmental restoration. I REALLY want there to be watershed networks and given my geography I look forward to being a part of the Chesapeake Watershed.
This is a book that made me think a lot, and beyond that it worked on me with its use of personal pronouns. It's far from the first stuff I've read that makes a point of upending traditional gender pronouns (I think Xenogenesis may be my first significant encounter with that long ago), but the degree and the rapid fluidity of the usage here (all required by the story I should note) definitely challenged my reading flow due to my old man conditioning. At some point during my read, though, that friction receded. I'm not saying I had no issues at all with the writing (some of which I recall was in regards to character motivations I found bit sudden and/or baffling and unsupported to me), but this was Emrys' book, not mine, and for something this inspired and beautifully-executed I'd feel pretty petty for nit-picking over what are ultimately personal choices. This is exceptional science fiction that I highly recommend.
Adding my emphatic thumbs-up for this feature which I've also been wanting in my interactions with the kbin UI.
