Author: Alan Buddug
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Rubber Bullets
The narrative around rubber bullets right now is protecting systematic abuse of US citizens by law enforcement by misdirecting you toward individual “bad apples”. This is important to understand because right now, the police are shooting a lot of people (including journalists) in the LA area with rubber bullets, and there’s a journalist who got…
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Solidarity
If you want to boil down the American problem to a single issue, then that issue is solidarity — or the lack of it. First, though, it is important to establish context, and that can be explained by paraphrasing Karl Marx (from The German Ideology, 1846): The ruling ideas are the ideas of the ruling…
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Signal: Overview of Security Issues
Recently, the Trump administration blundered idiotically yet again by adding a journalist to a Signal conversation about a military strike against the Houthis. As a result, there’s a lot of confusing or faulty information in the mainstream media regarding Signal. To be fair, these are complex issues, so here is a summary of Signal’s various…
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Democracy v. Policing
I’m working on a presentation about the plans American tech oligarchs have for ending democracy by accelerating the collapse of the US and then turning the country into a patchwork of corporate-controlled authoritarian city-states (which are being called “Freedom Cities” because we all love George Orwell, just for different reasons), and a quote from one…
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Crony Capitalism
One of the many pro-capitalist right-wing memes that you see floating around the Internet is this: “Crony capitalism is different from real capitalism.” I think you already know what crony capitalism is, but, basically, it just means there’s a close relationship between the capitalist class and important government officials to the extent that the government…
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Weird
You may recall this interesting moment in the 2024 Presidential election when Tim Walz called Donald Trump and his MAGA crew “weird”. Here’s the link to the video if you need a refresher: VIDEO: Tim Walz calls Donald Trump weird Next thing you know, the Harris campaign has chosen Walz as their VP candidate, but…
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The Cultural Assumptions That Hold Us Back
I’d like to highlight some of the cultural assumptions that prevent the United States of America from moving toward a better society. While I do believe that it is too late to rectify these issues, addressing them would be a first step in any movement that intended to bring about a more democratic, just, and…
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The Sad Farmer and the Impenetrable Bubble of American Propaganda
I’ve been trying to think of something to say that is both true and helpful. These days, that’s a real challenge. There’s a sad farmer on TikTok who has been putting in the effort to try to understand politics, and he’s come up with an explanation (which doubles as a defense) for why Republican voters…
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Paul Krugman: Liberal Economist
Paul Krugman is a liberal. A famous one. An expert on liberal economics. He seems like he means well. He recently posted this short essay encouraging people to oppose Trumpism rather than showing deference to Trump and his minions. It’s a good idea when I put it that way, but his exact wording is, “Oppose…
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Luigi and the Kingdom of Conservativism
There’s been substantial overlap between the left and the right in terms of support for Luigi Mangione, and I thought it would be a good idea to make it abundantly clear why that is the case, and also explain the limits of that overlap. First, a refresher on what it means to be a conservative:…