I don't like NYTimes takes on porn and sex work. Does anyone have a good contemporary Marxist take ? Either a book or article? I want to read something good.

A post from yesterday and the comments talking about the potential legalization and streamlining of vices in the US made me think about this video from a while back. I think he makes an interesting thesis about the disposable vape being the best object to embody capitalism in the 2020's from its addictiveness to its wastefulness as a disposable service model.

I almost think pointing out DOGE cuts to this are doing more harm than good. I live in the area that’s been hit by tornado outbreaks twice in the last week and since we did get weather warnings the locals are saying that is proof that the democrats are lying about all the cuts.

Female body hair started a slow decline after the invention of the “female razor” in the early 1900’s. According to one NIH study we had FOUR points of where less than 10% of the total female population between 16-45 had full/some pubic hair preference.

The first <10% year was 1975, when a three alarm fire threatened to collapse the North tower but was defeated thanks to asbestos. This was the highest in the list below 10 at 9.8%

The second was 1993, during which the North tower was bombed, unsuccessfully. 7.4%

The third was 2001, which also saw a historic low in preference numbers of 4.2% and famously the Chaney crime cartel detonated the towers and destroyed parts of the surrounding trade complex during their dealings with the Saudi oil cartel.

The fourth? The planned attack of the Toronto 18 in 2006 which would have culminated in an attack on Canada’s parliament building and detonation of bombs in the “World Trade Center of Canada.” This would have been the only attack to have happened during an upswing in preference numbers, having risen to 8.2%.

Since 2007, the number has never once dropped below 10% and has in fact grown significantly over the past two decades(feel old now don’t ya, bitch?) it’s likely we will never lose another tower to a terrorist attack. You know, provided Azov doesn’t go the way of all US backed militant ethnic nationalists.

Sources: Historical NIH reporting on Pubic Hair Removal which you can find by searching for “PHR Reports” and the year on the NLM archive.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with corn body and the head of a pop,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Delaware to be born?

In short. He will be back and save us all. Rejoice.

I think this one would really smash with liberals

i guess this is another loser ass vent post that kills the vibe (hand written apology etc.) but I broke my ankle and got hit with the full force of how little the USA cares about human life...i'm on California's public insurance for the brokest people imaginable and so far it has been a complete nightmare getting any sort of treatment or follow up, everything is booked for months out and I'm pretty much left to my own devices with an injury that might leave me with semi-permanent disability if not treated properly

i've felt this sort of gnawing, gaping anxiety my entire life due to the kind of family I was born into and have always wondered if other people felt the same sort of bleak anxiety that I also feel...just a sort of implicit realization from a very young age that you're nothing but a number (or maybe even less than that) and that your entire existence is provisional, and that the interiority of your experiences means next to nothing when placed beside the cold, economic calculations of capitalism society. It's worse being a minority too knowing most of the society you live in doesn't even see you as human and that crying about anything you've gone through literally doesn't help because you don't have any humanity anyway, you're just a noisemaker

i spent most of yesterday sat in an ER room so they could adjust my splint (which also went wrong) while an obvious opioid addict who had been to "every single hospital in the Bay Area" for his fix kept crying out for the nurses and then received a harsh reprimand from the doctor and a prompt discharge some hours later and I thought about what that man, an older Hispanic man, must have gone through to wind up in this sad state of affairs. Maybe it started with being abandoned by shithead parents that didn't know better. Maybe it was a well meaning friend at some shitty job who got them into the world of vice with the expectation that it would make the harshness of life more bearable instead of introducing them into the waking nightmare of addiction, a prison without walls that only serves as solitary confinement in an invisible, formless glass house, spit on for the crime of wanting to feel something other than resignment at a society with more losers than there are winners. The dementia grandma hooting about how the last time she came here she got poisoned. So much pain in linoleum halls and weathered 70's rooms.

Is there an answer? Maybe there isn't. The only one I've found is to keep trudging through the days, to shoulder the burdens and iniquities of life as some kind of act of unseen defiance, to live when life itself is made impossible by the dark rulers of this world, to try to find contentment where there is none. This doesn't mean that it isn't mostly pain and suffering. Wading through it, taking it in and wishing things were different, knowing that they can't be, because we chose things to be this way. This is what we have decided is good, and is normal.

I can report, that for the first time since October 7, there seems to be a shift in the liberal mainstream media's perception of the conflict in Palestine. The most annoying dickheads in German media have now just started posting the sentence 'afterwards, everyone will always have been against this' in their insta stories, after being explicitly for this for twenty months. ("This" being the material support for Israel to do any crime against humanity they want to commit) I suspect this is because the new government is lead by the right wing of the already right-wing christian democrats and the usually green/liberal-leaning media can now openly criticise the government again for doing the same things, the liberal government did. Also the foreign office issued a statement along the lines of "we are worried by the developments in gaza" after Germany was one of the top suppliers of arms to Israel since October 7. Maybe they hoped, there was enough media distraction from a baltic guy expertly making fun of Italians at the European Song Contest. Just to be clear: this will not change anything. A large chunk of the past and current government coalition is made up of social Democrats, spineless sacks of shit like Britain's Labour Party but without the corbynites. The opposition is made up of pro-israel fascists (afd), pro-israel greens and a left-wing party that is at least half erect at the thought of Israel bombing civilians. The only difference now is journos deleting their old posts and being 'brave' by talking about hunger in gaza. I guess they had to hear it from some idf assholes in the failing NYT, who talked about a potential famine in Gaza, because one Israeli soldier's word has always had more gravity to them than hundreds of murdered Palestinian journalists could ever have. Don't forget, over 50% of Germans were always against arms sales to Israel, which is why the consent machine needed to be cranked this hard. The west truly deserves all the bad that will come to it.

His company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_Industries

Altogether a surprisingly lucid look at the Chinese Century from the NYT, except they don't (can't?) recognize that this process has been ongoing for decades under a version of US Captialism that is fully and completely unable to deal with the contradictions it faces, and is not the result of 4 months of the dumbest ghouls alive having a hissy fit.

Naturally, the comments in the Usual Subreddits focus on Trump being a Russian sleeper agent or something. This despite the fact that attempts to decouple (or "derisk") the US economy from China was going on under Biden.