iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Rest in peace to Wendel Berry, one of America's great poets. Here are some of my favorite poems of his

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the abbot of unreason (an archaeologist) @merovingians.bsky.social · 18/08/2026

I don't trust anyone who talks about Cuba's revolution as a great and uncomplicated historical evil and I don't trust anyone who says single-party states are truer democracies and this puts me in discourse hell.

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

Beatnick candidates: Adlai Stevenson, Gene McCarthy, Jerry Brown. Who else?

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Guy who makes old DSA sigma edits for Harrington, Ehrenreich, and Dellums

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 12/08/2026

Hot take, but I think DSA NPC members should be more informed on public policy

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28 Days Lehner 🪦 @danlehner.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

[Homer sits backwards on a chair] let me tell you about ANOTHER giant brute who was being beaten by Nobody

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

It's obvious that AOC is the future of Democratic Socialism in the second quarter of the 21st century

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

I think part of the problem is that DSA doesn't have a whole of government theory of power and instead focuses on a politics of negation. What would a democratic socialist foreign policy actually look like?

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

I think most people that pay dues to dsa do so with the expectation that dsa is running socialists for office that will implement socialist policies

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Acyn @acyn.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

AOC: I said this a couple of weeks ago: I would not be surprised if, when ICE funding started up again, we would start to see more civilian deaths at the hands of ICE. And that’s exactly what has happened. We didn’t see things like this happening with the same degree when we froze ICE funding.

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

I think dsa should only endorse Democratic Socialists, and that the decision to endorse should be by a democratic vote of the whole

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Stephen Nuñez @socio-steve.bsky.social · 06/07/2026

Reminder: we are war crime-ing Cuba right now because Trump and Rubio want to collapse their government. Not a major part of the media discourse but it should be.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 24/06/2026

this is a great illustration of one of the fundamental insights of democracy — that there is no such thing as "the people" and that majorities are elusive and ever shifting. no election, no decision, is final and treating an election as a final decision is profoundly undemocratic.

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 24/06/2026

DSA really is where the energy is in left politics

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I Scare You Like Sound Dog @chadstanton.blacksky.app · 05/06/2026

Trump is going to do the Ninja Rap

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Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Henry Clay basically calls Pennsylvania Democratic Senator James Buchanan—whose stocky physique, cross-eyed gaze, high-pitched voice, and general dullness made him a favorite target of Clay's most vicious attacks—an incel on the floor of the Senate.

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

There is a group of on-line leftist men who hated the #MeToo Movement, ridiculed the women's march, and couldn't wait for MeToo to fail, Klippenstein is certain one of them

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The Decider @vibinthrghhistory.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

The gendered discourse from Klippenstein and co in the lead up to this only makes it worse

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

I'm sorry I wasn't a 30 year old resident of Maine

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Sam @samd.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

I do not think it is ageism to point out that a slim congressional majority will be at risk if we nominate a bunch of representatives in their 80s and 90s

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 12/05/2026

Impressive if Democratic Socialism becomes the good government ideology

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Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 01/08/2025

I should give up on all my personal goals and dedicate my life to the destruction of the Republican Party by any means necessary.

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Professa Murray @kalimurray.bsky.social · 30/04/2026

What we have lost as a political culture is people you have to Constitutional Conventions all the time, even before they could vote. Seneca Falls: a Convention! Colored Conventions were a thing. AFL-CIO still holds conventions. Populists had conventions.

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 03/04/2026

this is the chaplain btw. wonder why he was fired.

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 29/03/2026

Zohran brings out the Christian Socialist caucus

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Davedette @davedette.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

Chuck schumer whenever he sees an unpopular octogenarian who wants to run for senate:

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

Swalwell is the biggest opportunist in congress tbh. Excited for his career to end

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 22/03/2026

We need a serious new vision for the global order. A president willing to raise our commitment for humanitarian while also allowing other states to rival us militarily. A renewed United Nations with greater power given to the global south

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

The whole maine senate election this year is so embarrassing for everyone involved

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

If you don't vote your first election, you are unlikely to ever vote

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 17/03/2026

Who are the most green party coded candidates in america?

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 09/03/2026

Popular wisdom that income taxes are a major burden for most families is mostly an opp

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Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

No, *your* flag decal won't get you into heaven anymore. My flag decal, with the pistols and the Punisher skull on it, totally slaps ass and the man standing at the Pearly Gates will recognize that.

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Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

The piece I wrote for Liberal Currents on Musk's USAID cuts and how we can respond to them is out, take a look if you get the chance.

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Matthew Downhour @matthewdownhour.bsky.social · 13/02/2026

Sure only the tattoo but also Platner has yet to *run* in a race as big as the one Mamdani already won. The privileging of white faces as the ‘real American’ ones continues

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

I have been devastated all day over the passing of Reverand Jackson. He was one of the most impactful voices in my life

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appalachiaorganize.bsky.social @appalachiaorganize.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Rest in peace to the Reverend Jesse Jackson. His speeches, particularly his address to the 1988 DNC, have brought me hope in the hardest moments of my life. His work as an acolyte of Dr King, his creation of the Rainbow Coalition, kept the dream alive through the age of reaction

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 17/02/2026

i wrote this last year about jackson and mamdani www.nytimes.com/2025/08/23/o...

nytimes.com

Opinion | What Jesse Jackson and Zohran Mamdani Have in Common

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jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 18/02/2026

anyway let’s check in with keir starmer to see how “conceding to popular prejudice” is working our for the labour party

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Bill McKay @mckay4senate.bsky.social · 17/02/2026

A criticism of the revisionist interpretation of Richard Nixon as a liberal; it was the product of Nixon having to placate a Democratic Congress during a time when government intervention was still credible and seeking to silence potential issues during re-election.

A Democrats for Nixon ad portrayed McGovern as a flip-flopper because of his
awkward reversal in the Eagleton affair, and the president, by contrast, posed as
a pillar of firmness in 1972. Yet McGovern was a more consistent figure in his political career than Nixon had been. The startling opening to China by the fervent
anti-Communist was only the most obvious of Nixon’s reversals. His presidency
was a field for almost continual political zigzagging. The critic of government
interference in the free market at the start of his term was the initiator of wageprice controls in 1971. The advocate of affirmative action in his Philadelphia
Plan of 1969 was a sharp critic of racial quotas in 1972. The champion of a more
humane welfare system in 1969 was a stinging critic of “the welfare ethic” in
1972.
Nixon had conservative instincts, but he lacked conservative principles. Looking back at his presidency from the vantage point of the Reagan years, when conservative principles were ascendant, a number of “revisionist” historians began
to claim that Nixon had been, of all things, a liberal.25 They pointed to his ambitious Family Assistance Plan, his proposal for national health insurance, his plan
for affirmative action in the construction unions, his innovative record on the
environment. As Joan Hoff, the most prominent of the “revisionists,” put the argument, even if politics may have been the propelling motive, Nixon was staking
out advanced liberal ground during his presidency by his willingness “to move
beyond the twin boundaries of the New Deal and Great Society.”26

The “revisionist” thesis about Nixon is flawed, however. It makes Nixon look
liberal by taking him out of his historical context, in which government activism
was still popular, and examining him within the context of Reaganism. It slights
the fact that many of Nixon’s proposals'were responses to even stronger measures
proposed by the Democratic majority in Congress. It credits Nixon for executive
actions whose sources were genuine liberals—for there were still liberal Republicans then—in agencies like the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare
and the Environmental Protection Agency. And it downplays the ephemeral existence of so many of Nixon’s domestic initiatives. Jonathan Schell observes that
“the productions of the Nixon Administration emerged from nowhere and sank
back into nowhere when their usefulness was at an end.”27 “Usefulness” was the
key—and the usefulness of liberalism for Nixon, like the usefulness of conservatism, lay in electoral payoffs and not in ideology.
Environmental policy illustrates the electoral focus behind so much of Nixon’s
domestic policy. Because he supported the Environmental Protection Act, the
Clean Air Act of 1970, and a number of other environmental measures, he is often seen as a surprisingly progressive president in this field, especially against
the backdrop of the anti-environmental turn later taken by Republicans. But
Nixon’s policies were primarily responses to the upsurge of the environmental
movement at the end of the 1960s, which placed his administration on the defensive. In the Senate, Edmund Muskie of Maine and Scoop Jackson of Washington,
both of whom were expected to challenge Nixon for the presidency in 1972, were
competing with one another for the role of environmental champion. As historian J. Brooks Flippen comments, the president’s advisers told him that “the administration should embrace the new environmentalism, take the offensive, or
risk being run over on an issue that increasingly appeared political…

dramatic step that he personally disliked: he instituted the first system of peacetime wage-price controls in the nation’s history. Although the controls generated
discontent in the ranks of organized labor, they did the trick for Nixon’s electoral
prospects. The rate of inflation, running at 4.4 percent for the first half of 1971,
fell to 3.2 percent for the election year. McGovern hit hard on the issue, but with
the problem of rising prices seemingly coming under control, it did not help him
much in the election. Two months after his landslide victory, Nixon relaxed the
wage-price controls that had kept inflationary pressures under wraps through
the election and, exacerbated by soaring food and energy prices, inflation took
off again.31
Recession was an even larger contributor to Republicans’ electoral disappointment in 1970 than inflation. In 1972 the Nixon administration drove the
economy hard toward an expansionary surge. The president ordered government departments to spend money as quickly as they could during the first half
of the year, when the effects would be felt by Election Day. The Federal Reserve
helped out with an easy money policy. By the fall the economy was booming,
with real GNP growing by 8.1 percent in the final quarter of the year.32 Taking
no chances, the Nixon administration also directed as much money as it could
into voters* pockets during the months immediately preceding the election. In a
classic work of social science analysis, Political Control of the Economy, Edward
Hifte used Nixon as his prime example of how incumbents can manipulate economic factors before elections. He demonstrated how transfer payments—Social
Security benefits, veterans’ benefits, and federal grants-in-aid to state and local
governments—“accelerated in late 1972 and decelerated after the election.”33 So,
in 1972, voters had a choice between a dangerous, radical populist and a safe,
mainstream incumbent who was spreading prosperity far and wide.
Nixon cared about …

in the summer of 1972 positioned him as a shrewder negotiator than a pacifist
like McGovern could ever be. McGovern owned the issue of Vietnam when he
competed with a large field of rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination.
But in a Gallup Poll in the fall, Nixon Jed McGovern by 58 percent to 26 percent
on the question of who would “do a better job of dealing with the Vietnam situation.”36 McGovern’s “one issue,” the American disaster in Southeast Asia about
which he felt the deepest anguish, belonged in electoral terms to Nixon.
Positioning on policy to serve reelection was one component of Nixon’s fouryear campaign for a second term. With some luck and a lot more of design, Nixon’s policy choices worked in tandem in the election year to serve his interests
and sink McGovern’s hopes. Not all of Nixon’s policy stances were designed to
neutralize liberal issues so that Democrats were unable to exploit them or to
burnish the president’s credentials for bringing prosperity and peace. Some had
a different aim: to break apart the traditional Democratic coalition and draw its
disaffected constituencies over to the president’s side, even if they had to share
space there with their traditional adversaries.

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