Articles I think are worth reading
Miscellaneous topics
- Pluralistic: Tiktok's enshittification by Cory Doctorow. 21 January 2023. Why Tiktok, social media, online searches, and the overall internet gets shittier over time.
- How doctors die. It's not like the rest of us, but it should be by Ken Murray. 12 April 2016. Doctors often reject life-saving or life-extending treatments they offer to patients.
- Digital “Retrobait” Trades on Your Present Unhappiness to Collect Your Data by Grafton Tanner. 12 November 2023. Life in the not-so-distant past wasn't that rosy. Nostalgia is often exploited and comforting because present day life is worse, for you and many others.
- Swedish unions, why do we suck? by Rasmus Hästbacka. December 2021. Sweden has been historically known for its union density. But that's no longer true, as inequality rises and work conditions deteriorate. This is due to Sweden's pro-business unions, who cooperate with businesses and maintain "peace", rather than take strike action. Syndicalism is proposed as an alternative, which is (broadly) pro-worker but also anti-state.
- If the Temporary Foreign Worker Program Exists It Should be Run by Unions by Jay Lesoleil. 7 November 2024. A very simple compromise that ensures workers vital to Canada's existence are not exploited. (Note: Whether the country's existence should depend on imported labour at all is beyond the point of this article.)
- Sure, Phones Drive Anxiety. But So Does the Economy by Roland Paulsen. 27 November 2024. A scathing rebuke of therapy and mental illness/health discourse, specifically showing how such individualistic approaches are not only unproductive (i.e. therapy doesn't cure or help most "depression"), but also obscures economic factors that directly cause all sorts of mental malaise.
- Trudeau's Fall by Radhika Desai. 17 January 2025. A censure of Justin Trudeau's time as Canada's PM. Desai specifically addresses Trudeau's impotent identity politics. Under the Trudeau government, child poverty rose, Indigenous suffering continued (i.e. boil water advisories on reserves), the American war machine continuned unopposed, housing costs ballooned alongside cost of living, public services went underfunded, and even something as simple as first-past-the-post voting didn't happen.
Identity politics
- No Politics But Class Politics: Class, Identity, Inequality by Adam Theron-Lee Rensch. 9 May 2023. Name drops Adolph Reed and his writing on why racial politics is the "politics of the left wing of neoliberalism".
- A Response to Clover and Singh by Adolph Reed Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels. 1 June 2023. In response to Reed's article directly mentioned above, some liberal academics became rather incensed at effectively being outed as grifters. Reed and Michaels retort quite effectively, with one of their key points being that if liberals want to obsess over race (and racial minorities), universalist class-based politics disproportionately benefit minorities anyway, in addition to the poor and marginalised who are considered a part of the majority racial demographic.
- Not So Black and White by Kenan Malik. 9 May 2023. (Note: this is similar to the Reed & Michaels and Rensch articles.) Malik claims that it is disingenuous and lazy to focus on racial identity in social issues, when the reality is that most divisions occur based on class lines (particularly income). More importantly, Malik argues for a universalist approach that's rooted in class, rather than race.
- The Rise and (Likely) Fall of Wokeness by Vivek Chibber. 20 March 2025. Chibber provides a comprehensive history of identity politics, specifically how it has been used by elites of minority groups for their own advancement, at the expense of the working class. He then charts idpol's eventual mutation into contemporary wokeness, which repeated its historical refusal to address inequalities between classes. Instead, the focus of this phenomenon remained fixated on inequalities within a single class: the upper class, in the form of diversity and cultural policing. Most importantly, this type of politics rejects universalism (and its inherently antipoverty and redistributive nature) in favor of antiracism, and so on.
My own thoughts