Some people like to use consensus decision-making processes. Some like it so much that they have declared that all other decision-making techniques are oppressive. When people are first confronted with the idea of needing unanimous support to approve of decisions, hypothetical problems immediately occur to them. What if you can’t get unanimous agreement? What do [...]

I wrote a post a couple of days ago titled The death spiral of futile leftism. The basic thesis of the piece is 1) there are people on the left who are involved in a futile purity rituals that are mainly self-centered and not about winning, and 2) the existence of such people [...]

The left-left side of the blogosphere is chattering about lefter-than-thou sniping that is apparently aimed at people associated with the Jacobin. For readers who don’t pay attention to that stuff, Jacobin magazine is a socialist magazine that is popular. The lefter-than-thou crowd is comprised of people who do everything they can [...]

Divestment campaigns almost never work. Sometimes a campaign might actually get a fund to sell off and refuse to buy certain stocks, but rarely will it ever get enough funds to do so simultaneously, which is what’s necessary to actually exert any pressure. I suspect these kinds of campaigns are pursued in part because people [...]

A group calling itself Strike Debt has a new initiative called the Rolling Jubilee. The basic idea is to purchase distressed debt for pennies on the dollar — as collection agencies regularly do — and then cancel the debt. Through this strategy they estimate that they can cancel $20 of debt for every [...]

In past couple of weeks, activists from the National Immigrant Youth Alliance staged sit-ins at Obama campaign offices, demanding an executive order halting the deportation of youth eligible for the DREAM Act. Obama caved to the demands, issuing a Department of Homeland Security directive stopping certain kinds of deportations.

An estimated [...]

One of the most frustrating things about being on the left is the profound number of clowns who situate themselves beside me. We’ve got generational warfare clowns. We’ve got New Age gibberish clowns. We’ve got conspiracy theory clowns. We’ve got clowns that smash storefronts in costumes, terrifying and alienating [...]

I generally agree with the argument laid down by Matthew Yglesias today about the Keystone XL project. On its face, picking one particular carbon energy project and trying to prevent it from being completed does not make a great deal of sense. Doing so does not actually reduce total carbon emissions, at least [...]