USA
The US is the most populous English-speaking country in the world, and currently also the world’s strongest imperialist power. It’s also a country with high levels of inequality at home and very little of a social safety net. I’ve been there once, Los Angeles specifically, over New Years 2020.
Wiki
- : 🪴 Marcus Garvey: Marcus Garvey was a Black nationalist whose ideas were at the peak of their popularity in the late 1910s/early 1920s. …
- : 🪴 War on Terror: On 18 September 2001, the US Congress passed a measure called the Authorization for Use of Military Force. Spencer …
- : 🎮 Monopoly: Monopoly is a board game notorious for breaking families and friend groups apart. Games are generally pretty long, and …
- : 🪴 Julian Assange: Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, a website that has famously published documentary evidence of governmental …
- : 🪴 East Palestine Ohio rail disaster: On 3 February 2023, a train carrying vinyl chloride (a carcinogen) and nine other hazardous chemicals caught fire and …
- : 🪴 Anne Sacoolas: Anne Sacoolas is an American national who in 2019 chose to drive at speed down the wrong side of a road near a US …
- : 🪴 Henry Ford: Henry Ford (1863–1947) was an American capitalist, well known for founding the Ford Motor Company, promulgating the mass …
- : 🪴 JROTC: JROTC is a program in many American schools (including 1 in 4 urban schools, which are largely lower-income and …
- : 🪴 Industrial Workers of the World: The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or the Wobblies, was an industrial union of the early 20th century that …
- : 🪴 Frank Crosswaith: Frank Crosswaith (1892–1965) was a Virgin Islands-born American Black socialist and trade union organiser. He moved to …
- : 🪴 A. Philip Randolph: A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979) was a prominent socialist activist in the civil rights movement. Jacobin summarises his …
- : 🪴 Maryknoll sisters: The Maryknoll sisters were an order of Catholic nuns from the USA who were doing missionary work in Central America and …
- : 🪴 St Louis Commune: The St Louis Commune was an outpouring of the Great Railroad Strike that hit much of the USA in summer 1877. For 24 …
- : 🪴 Great Railroad Strike: The Great Railroad Strike, a.k.a. the Great Upheaval, was a period of intense industrial action in the USA in 1877. The …
- : 🪴 New Mexican Spanish: New Mexican Spanish is the variety of Spanish traditionally spoken in the US states of New Mexico and the southern part …
- : 💬 English: English is a Germanic language with approx. 373 million native speakers and 1.08 billion L2 speakers, making it the most …
- : 🪴 Deseret alphabet: The Deseret alphabet was an alternative alphabet proposed for writing English by Mormons in Salt Lake City in the middle …
- : 🪴 Steven Donzinger: Steven Donzinger is an American human rights lawyer who spent six months imprisoned after a politically-motivated …
- : 🪴 Black Panthers: The Black Panthers were a revolutionary socialist and Black liberationist organisation which was founded in Oakland, …
- : 🪴 W.E.B. Du Bois: W.E.B Du Bois (1868–1963) was an African-American intellectual who is considered one of the pioneers of pan-African …
- : 🪴 Lucy Parsons: Lucy Parsons (c. 1853–1942) was an American anarchist of mixed-race background. She was born in Texas, married a white …
- : 🪴 Benjamin Franklin: Benjamin Franklin was a polymath and American revolutionary. He grew up in a Puritan community in Boston. He admired …
- : 🪴 Haymarket Affair: On 1 May 1886, a quarter of a million workers went on strike in Chicago, closing businesses and flooding the streets …
- : 🪴 Pullman Strike: In 1894, the Pullman Palace Car Company decided to lay off numerous workers and dramatically cut the wages of many more …
- : 🪴 Eugene Debs: Eugene V. Debs (1855–1926) was an American socialist. He was radicalised in the aftermath of the Pullman Strike, where …
- : 💬 Transatlantic accent: The Transatlantic accent is a non-rhotic prestige accent of English that was popular among the US upper classes in the …
- : 🪴 McCarthyism: “McCarthyism” is often used to describe the period of intense repression of leftists in the US that occurred …
- : 🪴 US repression of leftists: At many times in its history, the US has embarked on a vicious crackdown of the Left (socialists, anarchists, trade …
- : 🪴 Guantánamo Bay: Guantánamo Bay is a corner of Cuba militarily occupied by the USA, which uses it to hold a detention centre for alleged …
- : 🪴 Leonard Peltier: Leonard Peltier is a Native American activist who has been in prison for 45 years for supposedly shooting two FBI agents …
- : 🪴 Aaron Swartz: Aaron Swartz was a gifted computer programmer who was charged with a severe stack of offences that could have sent him …
- : 🪴 Reality Winner: Reality Winner is an American whistleblower who, in 2017, leaked a classified cable to the news media which confirmed …
- : 🪴 COINTELPRO: COINTELPRO was a secret program of the FBI to disrupt and break up (mostly) radical left-wing organisations, …
- : 🪴 1985 MOVE bombing: On 13 May 1985, Philadelphia police bombed a building inhabited by 13 members of the “anarcho-primitive” …
- : 🍱 corn: Corn, or maize, is a plant that I always knew growing up as a vegetable (in the form of sweet corn), but is actually a …
Posts
- : 🇺🇸 On Homelessness, Crime and Drugs: So I read this article, How San Francisco Became a Failed City (external link). I was going to save it as a link …
- : 🌶 Micro post: Today I learned that in the US, “chilli powder” usually means a mild spice blend intended for use in the …
- : 🇺🇸 Twenty Years Since 9/11: I’m writing this post on September 12, but that’s accurate actually, because by the time the 9/11 attacks …
- : 📚 On Book Localisations for the US Market: Earlier today I read a Reddit thread about book localisations for the US market (external link), and while …
- : 🇺🇸 Stray Thoughts on the Storming of the US Capitol: It seemed like it would be remiss of me to post today without mentioning the day’s biggest news: the storming of …
Links
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Texas judge is close to banning medication-induced abortion” by Kevin Drum
- : 👮 Link: “The Anti-“Terrorist” Crackdown on Cop City Protesters Is the War on Terror Coming Home”
- : 👮 Link: “Supreme Court rejects Ohio man’s bid to sue police over arrest for Facebook parody”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “A short and dirty history of US imperialism”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Trump Plans to Bring Back Firing Squads, Group Executions if He Retakes White House”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Why Mickey Mouse’s 1998 copyright extension probably won’t happen again”
- : 💬 Link: “Do accents disappear?”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “The Failure of Reconstruction Is to Blame for the Weakness of American Democracy”
- : 🚙 Link: “Jessica Hart’s 5-year-old was killed by a car while riding her bike in DC. Now Hart is fighting for safer streets.”
- : 💬 Link: “Stop using ‘Latinx’ if you really want to be inclusive”
- : 📚 Link: “The Spectacular Life of Octavia Butler”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Thanksgiving thoughts” by Chris Arnade
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Joe Hill Was Killed For Singing Labor’s Song”
- : 👮 Link: “The Border Patrol Has Vast, Largely Unchecked Powers That Are Expanding”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “The 1929 Loray Mill Strike Was a Landmark Working-Class Struggle in the US South”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Injected with Plutonium”
- : 📺 Link: “Hollywood’s Insistence on New Draconian Copyright Rules Is Not About Protecting Artists”
- : 📖 Link: “On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich”
- : 🚘 Link: “What I Mean When I Say ‘Ban Cars’”
- : 📚 Link: “‘Where the Crawdads Sing’ Author Wanted for Questioning in Murder”
- : 🎬 Link: “Abolish the Military-Entertainment Complex”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “I Should Be Able To Mute America”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Elephant in the Zoom: How Meltdowns Brought Progressive Groups to a Standstill”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Against Afro-Pessimism”
- : 💬 Link: “Lakota elders helped a white man preserve their language. Then he tried to sell it back to them.”
- : 💰 Link: “Who owns Einstein? The battle for the world’s most famous face”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Breakfast with the Panthers”
- : 📚 Link: “Please don’t let anyone Americanise it!”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Search histories, location data, text messages: How personal data could be used to enforce anti-abortion laws”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Joe Biden Is Making Americans’ Political Nihilism Worse”
- : 🏘 Link: “We Need Public Housing, Not Affordable Housing”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “The Red Scare Scarred the Left — But Couldn’t Kill It”
- : 🚊 Link: “Cincinnati Built a Subway System 100 Years Ago–But Never Used It”
- : 🇺🇦 Link: “An Antifascist’s Position on Ukraine” by Emily Gorcenski
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “This lawyer should be world-famous for his battle with Chevron – but he’s in jail”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Glenn Youngkin Set Up a Tip Line to Snitch on Teachers. It’s Only Gotten Weirder Since.”
- : ☎️ Link: “Searching for Susy Thunder”
- : 🏙 Link: “Look around you. The way we live explains why we are increasingly polarized”
- : 💬 Link: “That Weirdo Announcer-Voice Accent: Where It Came From and Why It Went Away”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Was Julie Amero wrongly convicted?”
- : 🇨🇱 Link: “Declassified documents show Australia assisted CIA in coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Ethel Rosenberg was convicted of espionage and executed in 1953. But did she really deserve to die?”
- : 🇮🇱 Link: “Laying the foundations for our Jewish liberation”
- : 🏬 Link: “Pandemic Shoppers Are a Nightmare to Service Workers”
- : 📺 Link: “Who Actually Gets to Create Black Pop Culture?”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “The Many Faces of Regime Change in Cuba”
- : 🪖 Link: “Right-Wing Operation Condor Murderers Should Be in Jail”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Six Months After the Capitol Riots, We Still Won’t Admit Why So Many People Believe the Big Lie”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Emily Wilder’s Firing Is No Surprise: AP Has Always Been Right-Wing”
- : 🏙 Link: “The Cuyahoga River Caught Fire at Least a Dozen Times, but No One Cared Until 1969”
- : 💬 Link: “The academic story of African American English has been wrong all along.”
- : 🇵🇸 Link: “What We Did: How the Jewish Communist Left Failed the Palestinian Cause”
- : 🦠 Link: “India needs our vaccines”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “MLK Was a Radical Who Hated Not Only Racial Subordination But Class Exploitation”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “The Three Factions of the American Left” by Ross Barkan
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Liberals Should Stop Trying to Save the GOP. Republicans Don’t Want to Be Saved.”
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “How Korea Became a Forgotten War”
- : 👮 Link: “It’s the anniversary of Malcolm X’s assassination.…” by Hari Kunzru
- : 🇺🇸 Link: “Griddy customers face $5,000 electric bills for 5 freezing days in Texas”
- : 🎬 Link: “Judas and the Black Messiah Actually Does Fred Hampton Justice”
Interactions
- : ❤️ Like of: “My American thought experiment” by Ben Werdmüller
- : ❤️ Like of: “The Affordable Game” by Patrick Rhone
Book Reviews
- : 📚 Book review: Kindred by Octavia E. Butler (★★★)
- : 📚 Book review: Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (★★★)
- : 📚 Book review: Shanghai Girls by Lisa See (★★★★)
- : 📚 Book review: Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (★★★★)
- : 📚 Book review: The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (★★★)
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.