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jtownsend.bsky.social

@jtownsend.bsky.social
132 followers 125 following 448 posts
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
It's a definition that excludes me (lowest quintile, physical labor in a union job, waged work for decades) because I went to school, but includes small businessmen who worked for their family firm and have a nominally low salary. All so they can spit out Working Class wisdom like:
Jacobin table asserting on the basis of their cockamamie "working class" definition that abolishing ICE, defending trans rights and "reducing or redirecting" funding for police are unpopular with said class, while carefully couched climate and abortion policy changes nothing and "a path to immigration" aren't too left wing for the worker. (Interestingly they have shaded the 2010s Dem/GWB slogan "path to immigration" positively even though their own cooked "working class" sample liked it less than abolishing ICE, which they represent as a policy to avoid.)
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
This is the modern reality. Turning *that* kind of "security guarantee," of all things, into a sacred cow with which to bludgeon fellow NDPers?
Incredible, self-abasing text NATO Secretary General Rutte sent to Donald Trump, sycophantically praising him for bullying them so well.
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
The BonziBuddy logo but with Tux the Linux mascot put in there. It would be funnier with the banana in the other flipper but I doubt I could make it look good
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 03/06/2026
@mark-carney.bsky.social I appreciate that Canada's negotiating strategy with the US consciously underreacts but if you don't PNG foreign diplomats who say things like this, after all that's come in this vein already, you're normalizing a would-be proconsul. They imagine themselves our masters.
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 28/04/2026
This was bouncing around a few years ago, attributed LIFE, Apr. '49. Honestly the idea of people still having a culturally normative taxonomy of this stuff seems obsolete enough that this kind of arbitrary 20thC artifact may circulate more widely than actual organic & shared modern equivalents?
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 12/02/2026
That *is* a fun fact. Please enjoy this bilingual generic cheez-whizz.
Spreadable processed cheese from Canadian generic "No Name" brand labeled "cheese-tastic" in English and the much funnier "fromidable!" in French
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 13/12/2025
Maybe a cliche choice but it's the first one I think of
1982 Far side cartoon: two devils watching the damned doing hard labour in hell see a goofy guy cheerfully whistling as he moves rocks in a wheelbarrow; one devil says to the other "You know, we're just not reaching that guy."
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
Excerpt from Megan Greenwell's piece on the killing of Deadspin in which Jim Spamfilter basically paraphrases the "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders" cartoon Tom Toro drew for the New Yorker in 2012The Tom Toro New Yorker cartoon of a post-apocalyptic world in which a bedraggled man in a business suit explains to bedraggled children that "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time, we created a lot of value for shareholders." It doesn't have the caption on the bottom to make it more of a cultural reference and less me directly stealing from Tom Toro.
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
👋
A dw-nominate visualization of 2023-5 House Representatives from Voteview.com shows Rep Chris Deluzio near the rightmost edge of the Democratic caucus on the Economic/Redistributive axis
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 07/03/2025
(Sorry if this is belaboring the Deluzio angle which may not be your point, but:)
A dw-nominate visualization of 2023-5 House Representatives from Voteview.com shows Rep Chris Deluzio near the rightmost edge of the Democratic caucus on the Economic/Redistributive axis
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 13/02/2025
sad and telling that the do-somethings are trying to spoil the CODEL's cherished weisswurst and sweet mustard at the Bayerischer Hof
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 30/12/2024
I doubt I'm well-enough grounded to count as a critic here but: I find the idea of a train of reasoning like this that could convince me of the causal reality of my own subjective experiences, and should in fact try and find some for me, but I don't immediately grasp how this example is dispositive.
Excerpt from https://www.lse.ac.uk/philosophy/blog/2024/07/11/why-is-animal-consciousness-controversial-talking-to-my-inner-sceptic/ , a short essay on consciousness by Jonathan Birch.
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 25/12/2024
How well is this plan working, you ask? Let's investigate "futhe," as they say:
A typographical error and several very low subscriber and viewcounts are highlighted in a screenshot of a youtube channel attempting to market vertical videos to skull shape appreciators.
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 25/12/2024
@proufos.bsky.social An excerpt from Taylor's summing-up of the "High Command" group criminality case at IMT, August 1946.
A page of text from Yale's Avalon Project transcripts of the 1945-6 Nuremberg Trials; Telford Taylor summarizes the case that senior German officers collectively constituted a criminally responsible group under Nuremberg's "criminal groups" model. Page 1/4A page of text from Yale's Avalon Project transcripts of the 1945-6 Nuremberg Trials; Telford Taylor summarizes the case that senior German officers collectively constituted a criminally responsible group under Nuremberg's "criminal groups" model. Page 2/4A page of text from Yale's Avalon Project transcripts of the 1945-6 Nuremberg Trials; Telford Taylor summarizes the case that senior German officers collectively constituted a criminally responsible group under Nuremberg's "criminal groups" model. Page 3/4A page of text from Yale's Avalon Project transcripts of the 1945-6 Nuremberg Trials; Telford Taylor summarizes the case that senior German officers collectively constituted a criminally responsible group under Nuremberg's "criminal groups" model. Page 4/4
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 19/11/2024
Put differently, I don't think Mike Davis was being unduly pessimistic, or that there's a national frontier behind which one can escape this phenomenon:
Excerpt from Mike Davis' March 2022 blogpost "Thanatos Triumphant" in NLR: "Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum, but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it. I think what we must diagnose instead is a ruling class brain tumour: a growing inability to achieve any coherent understanding of global change as a basis for defining common interests and formulating large-scale strategies.

In part this is the victory of pathological presentism, making all calculations on the basis of short-term bottom-lines in order to allow the super-rich to consume all the good things of the earth within their lifetimes. (Michael Aglietta in his recent *Capitalisme: Le temps des ruptures* emphasises the unprecedented character of the new sacrificial generational divide.) Greed has become radicalized to the extent that it no longer needs political thinkers and organic intellectuals, just Fox News and bandwidth. In the worse case-scenario, Elon Musk will simply lead a billionaire migration off planet."
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jtownsend.bsky.social @jtownsend.bsky.social · 21/09/2024
Bari Weiss University never teaches you to skim the first few paragraphs of the wikipedia article to see if your trenchant insight got stunted on in 1931
Excerpt from surprisingly decent wikipedia article "Left-right political spectrum," quoting French essayist Alain in 1931: "When people ask me if the division between parties of the Right and parties of the Left, men of the Right and men of the Left, still makes sense, the first thing that comes to mind is that the person asking the question is certainly not a man of the Left."
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