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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 1d

Dude this was such a great episode, I’ve been struggling with this stuff a lot lately—not satisfied with the value form approach, but not enough Marx in the other lit. This answered a lot of questions. Thanks and great ep!

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 1d

This is an absolute MUST listen if you’re like me and have been recently thinking about the history of capitalism and subsumption but feel there’s something just a little too abstract about the Value Form stuff

What's Left of Philosophy @leftofphilosophy.bsky.social · 1d

new episode out now! we talk about Alfred Sohn-Rethel's work on real abstraction and his theory of commodity exchange as the origin of transcendental subjectivity. we love a big swing and this is truly a big swing, folks www.patreon.com/posts/122-re...

122 | Real Abstraction and the Origin of Consciousness with Alfred Sohn-Rethel | What's Left of Philosophy

www.patreon.com

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 1d

so uh are the Mariners going to go to the World Series

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 2d

Evil Weberian! I love this idea. Well, not "love," you know what I mean, lol. I think this is right

matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 2d

and Curtis Yarvin is just a narcissistic blogger man be real lol

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 2d

I'm not sure I agree with this. The bizarro-Gramsci stuff on the right was big during Obama (Glenn Beck would name him on his show!). This is because they viewed *media* as the place where they had lost ground. Vought is a bureaucrat who understands that you make hegemony meet YOU, not the other way

Henry Farrell @himself.bsky.social · 3d

My version of this is that Vought, Yarvin etc represent a kind of braindead right-Gramscianism, which leaves out all the interesting subtleties and treats civil society _only_ as a realm of indoctrination, where one ideological master-narrative can readily be substituted for another.

jamelle @jamellebouie.net · 3d

a key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 2d

I endorse this theory. Not because I have any expertise on the matter, it just makes me feel part of something lol

Kelsey Atherton @atherton.bsky.social · 2d

Working on a theory that, thanks to what Silicon Valley has done to the bay, Portland now exemplifies the imaginary of lefty metropolis that San Francisco did in the last century, the Oberlin of Cities

Ian Boudreau @ianboudreau.com · 2d

Emergency naked bike ride is just a really funny idea

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Reposted by matthew ellis

Jeff VanderMeer @jeffvandermeer.bsky.social · 3d

This heartfelt and meaningful statement by Portland resident and author Cristina Breshears on another social media platform bears reposting here. I don't think the intent is to idealize Portland but to remind all of us what is important and why. (Posted here with permission.)

For nine nights now, the steady thrum of Black Hawk helicopters has circled over Portland. The sound is constant, invasive; a low mechanical beating above our homes. It’s expensive. It’s intimidating. And it’s unnecessary.

Our protests have been largely peaceful. There is no insurrection here. Yet this federalized military presence makes us feel like we are living in a war zone (the very kind of chaos this administration claims to be protecting us from).

The irony is painful: it is only this occupation that makes Portland feel unsafe.

Each hour of helicopter flight costs taxpayers between $2,000 and $4,000, depending on crew, fuel, and maintenance. Multiply that by multiple aircraft over multiple nights, and you’re looking at hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of dollars burned into the sky.

Meanwhile, the Woodstock Food Pantry at All Saints Episcopal Church — which feeds working families, elders, and people with disabilities — has seen its federal funding slashed by 75%. How can we justify pouring public money into intimidation while cutting aid to those who simply need to eat?

This is waste, fraud, and abuse in plain sight:
* Waste of public resources on military theatrics.
* Fraud in the name of “public safety.”
* Abuse of the communities that federal agencies claim to protect.

Portland is a Sanctuary City. A sanctuary city is not a fortress. It’s a promise — a living vow that a community will protect the dignity and safety of everyone who calls it home. It means that local governments and ordinary people alike will refuse to criminalize survival. That schools, clinics, churches, and shelters will remain safe spaces no matter who you are or where you were born. But the term reaches far beyond policy. It’s an ethic of belonging; a refusal to criminalize need, difference, or desperation.

Sanctuary isn’t weakness. It’s courage. It takes moral strength to meet suffering with care instead of punishment, to believe that our neighbors’ safety is bound up in our own, to insist that safety is not achieved through force but through community, inclusion, and trust. It is living Matthew 25:40 out loud and in deed. It is an act of moral imagination and moral defiance. To hold sanctuary is to say: you belong here.

When we hold space for the most vulnerable — refugees, the unhoused, the undocumented, the disabled, the working poor, the displaced — we become something larger than a collection of individuals. We become a moral body. We do more than offer charity. We offer witness. We declare that the measure of a nation is found not in its towers or tanks, but in its tenderness.

Sanctuary cities are not lawless; they are soulful. They represent the conscience of the nation, a place where the laws of empathy still apply. To make sanctuary is to affirm that the United States is not merely a geographic territory, but a moral experiment: a republic that must constantly choose between fear and compassion, between domination and democracy.

A nation’s soul is measured not by the might of its military, but by the mercy of its people. When helicopters circle our skies in the name of order, while food pantries struggle to feed the hungry, we are forced to ask: What are we defending, and from whom? The soul of a nation survives only when we make sanctuary for one another. Not through walls or weapons, but through compassion and collective will. If we allow intimidation to replace compassion, we will have traded our conscience for control.

Please know that despite the hum of war machines overhead, the conscience of our city — whimsical, creative, stubbornly kind — can still be heard.

Portland is not the problem. Portland is the reminder. A reminder that a city can still choose to be sanctuary. That a people can still choose to be human.

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 2d

we're so fucked man www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/10...

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Reposted by matthew ellis

Chase Madar @madar.bsky.social · 3d

Pointless to fret about Kamala Harris one way or another as her active political career is finito. (Should she run in what is surely to be a competitive primary come 2028 it will be over quickly for her, just as in 2019.)

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 3d

Watching the bear in the little car

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 4d

It’s Hungary week on @tpnwicmfp.bsky.social as we discuss a film that didn’t win the Nobel Prize (but is still awesome), THE TRAGEDY OF MAN podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...

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Reposted by matthew ellis

Bulldog @harpua.bsky.social · 6d

Portland City Council member Angelita Morillo humorously criticizes Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, leading to laughter from CNN's Boris Sanchez.

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 5d

maybe the answer to all of this is a public/private partnership

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 6d

This is the concern right. It's clear the right has no intention of ever losing an election ever again. It's good that normie liberals are starting to realize the danger of the moment, but does anyone have any idea what to do if they change the rules to make what they are doing legal?

Regime Accountant, CPA ☠️🎢 @regimecpa.bsky.social · 6d

So uh you should ask for these machines to be removed from your state.

Jacob Shamsian @jayshams.bsky.social · 6d

I've been wondering why Dominion Voting Systems suddenly reached settlements with Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, and One America News.

Turns out, it's been purchased by a Republican-owned election tech firm that insisted on it, per Axios.

www.axios.com/2025/10/09/d...

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 6d

yeah i'm not going to lie it feels very bad to be in portland right now, they are trying to start his here lol

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 6d

The liberals were not wrong in their focus on Russia during the first Trump admin, but because they were mostly raised during the end of the Cold War they couldn't see it through any other lens beyond The Dangerous Slavic Mind Controlling Trump. What we see instead is rapid imperial decline

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Xander Lenc @xlenc.bsky.social · 6d

Lately I've been wondering if the opioid crisis should be thought about alongside the post-1991 epidemic in alcohol-related deaths in Russia.

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 6d

Feeling more and more like we need to spend less time imagining precise analogies to Germany in the 1930s—some of which are real to be clear—and start thinking more about what happened to Russia from 1992-the 2010s

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 6d

yo lmao

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 6d

man this is real not good

Mark Bray @mark-bray.bsky.social · 6d

“Someone” cancelled my family’s flight out of the country at the last second.

We got our boarding passes. We checked our bags. Went through security. Then at our gate our reservation ‘disappeared.’

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Reposted by matthew ellis

rob @ok-but-still.bsky.social · 7d

i predict a series of wonderful events will close out 2025

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Ned Resnikoff @resnikoff.bsky.social · 7d

If the regime does go after DSA, the appropriate response will be for as many people as possible to become dues-paying members.

Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com · 7d

Jonathan Choe to Trump: "Another group right now that is behind antifa and working with antifa very closely based on the research that we have right now that we're gonna give to you and your team are the Democratic Socialists of America."

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matthew ellis @matthiasellis.com · 7d

we need to build new universities since the ones we have are not up for the task

Chris Morran @themorrancave.bsky.social · 7d

NEW: As Linda McMahon guts the Dept. of Education, she’s operated in what she calls “a parallel universe” to radically shift how future kids will learn -- seeking to dismantle the public school system in favor of private and Christian schools or homeschooling.

These Activists Want to Dismantle Public Schools. Now They Run the Education Department.

Under Trump, the Department of Education has been bringing in activists hostile to public schools. It could mean a new era of private and religious schools boosted by tax dollars — and the end of publ...

www.propublica.org

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