Lawns suck. At a time when record-setting wildfires, droughts, and famines threaten global security and human flourishing, Americans are deciding every year to use 30–60% of their drinking water propping up an invasive species with no practical use. Lawns are the single most irrigated crop in the United States, conservatively taking up three times more acreage than corn. Gas powered lawn mowers account for five percent of the air pollution in the United States, while overuse of fertilizer and pesticides leads to toxic runoff polluting our waterways.

If we can’t use grass for anything, why do we sacrifice so much…

I just watched two videos, one after the other, that brought an idea so sharply into my mind it was as if providence herself inspired the thought. The first video was an interview on The Roads With Beau with Kim Kelly on her months of journalistic work with the striking miners at Warrior Met Coal. It’s a great interview, full of talk about worker cooperatives, mutual aid, unions, and other great stuff going down in the rural deep south.

One thing in particular stood out about Kelly’s experience. The striking miners are under constant threat of vehicular attacks: trucks and…

Democracy is a good thing, right? Why not try it? Our current systems are experiencing crises of oligarchy, where ordinary people elect representatives who enact policy on behalf of powerful elites. The actual will of the people is little reflected in government, and extremely important decisions like war and trade deals are left out of our hands almost entirely. This has led to conspiracy theories like QAnon that proclaim a cabal of satanic pedophiles is running the government of the United States, among other things.

This represents a trend across the political spectrum: our representatives and government feel like actual…

Game of Thrones is not a political show. It is a show about politics itself. The fantasy elements are almost superfluous. The core of the series is how it tackles different ideas of power and squares them against each other in the brutal arena of m̶e̶d̶i̶e̶v̶a̶l̶ ̶E̶u̶r̶o̶p̶e̶ Westeros.

The series starts off with King Robert Baratheon, an accidental revolutionary. He is an excellent military commander, and ends up taking political control over seven kingdoms after some personal drama leads him to destroy the old regime. …

There’s a popular point of view that proposes the only meaningful difference in politics is between socialism and capitalism. Socialism is whenever the government does stuff, and capitalism is whenever free private individuals do stuff. In this view, terms like “state capitalist” and “libertarian socialist” are meaningless oxymorons. Fascism and Communism are not meaningfully distinct concepts: they basically boil down to nationalist socialism and international worker’s socialism.

I’m usually pretty dismissive of this way of thinking. It’s extremely reductive, boiling down the vast forms of human organization into two flat categories. …

I just got hit with the old Socialism doesn’t work because of human nature “argument”. This wouldn’t usually bother me too much, but it was in reply to an article I spent weeks researching for, so I was pretty irritated.

It’s a great example of a thought-terminating cliche, a tactic used by cults and the like to prevent critical thinking. Cliche means it gets repeated nauseatingly often. Thought-terminating means it’s dismissive and its purpose is to shut down discussion. …

The true test of a political system is how it reacts to challenges and crises in the real world. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria was born into some of the most difficult circumstances on the planet. Originally known as Rojava, the administration arose in the midst of the Syrian Civil War, in direct conflict with the genocidal Islamic State. After multiple invasions from Turkey and abandonment by its American allies, it has been forced to negotiate with an incredibly complex set of internal and external actors, many of whom pose a threat to its existence.

It’s in…

In 1947, the Christian Socialist Methodist Minister Harry Ward wrote a pamphlet called Soviet Democracy, celebrating the achievement of a socialist democracy that exceeded anything built by the United States. Beyond a collaboratively constructed constitution establishing both the legal and economic rights of its people, the USSR was able to implement its lofty ideals through “hard-won experience”.

According to Ward, collective ownership of the economy allows for a new kind of “creative democracy”, in which the people collaborate with experts to develop plans working towards the common aims of all. …