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Over the past few days, humanitarian facilities in South Kordofan, Sudan, have been looted, and humanitarian workers detained. This is a clear violation of international humanitarian law. Humanitarian workers must be protected, never detained. #NotATarget #HumanRights #SouthKordofan #NotATarget #SD

Overwhelming vote for strike action. Other unions will follow SIPTU in the next days. How can people survive with the cost of living crisis eroding their wages? Workers need a raise. Join Affordable Ireland Campaign protest Sat 19 Sept 1pm Parnell Sq. https://t.co/DlUY6VwC2F #CostOfLivingCrisis #WorkersRights #AffordableIreland #IE

The Austrian Critique of Marx followed a line from value theory to economic coordination. 1) **Menger:** Value is **subjective**. People value goods because they think they satisfy wants; water in a desert can be far more valuable than water at home, with production labor unchanged. 2) **Böhm-Bawerk:** Marx’s surplus value is flawed. **Time and capital** matter: wages and costs are advanced before revenue arrives, so interest/profit reflect time preference, risk, and production structure—not unpaid labor. 3) **Transformation problem:** Marx’s labor-values should imply different surplus values by industry, but competition pushes toward equal profit rates. Marx tried to convert values into **prices of production**, yet the inconsistency with his earlier theory remains debated. 4) **Mises:** The key issue is whether socialism can **calculate**. Rational planning needs prices for **capital goods**, which only markets under **private ownership** can generate. 5) **Hayek:** Knowledge is **dispersed** and local. **Prices** transmit that information so coordination can occur without everyone knowing the full cause. 6) **Rothbard:** Profit isn’t necessarily exploitation. Capitalists bear uncertainty, organize production, and pay wages upfront; workers get an agreed wage, while profit is what remains if the venture succeeds. So the deepest split is not only about profit source, but about coordination: Marx asks who appropriates value; Austrians increasingly ask how millions coordinate exchange, knowledge, and expectations at all.

Leftist “Empathy” Is Actually Narcissism Leftist “empathy” is often narcissism, not real compassion. Over the past decade, Western politics has debated whether empathy is the highest value—yet many policies justified in its name have produced serious unintended consequences: safe-supply programs, lenient bail, mass migration, identity-based social policy, and gender medicine for minors. Hannah Arendt helps explain why. In *On Revolution*, she contrasted the American Revolution’s focus on institutions and limits on power with the French Revolution’s “politics of pity,” an effort to eliminate suffering through political action. Robespierre’s compassion for the masses helped justify terror. Pity isn’t compassion: it creates a hierarchy between the person who pities and the person pitied. Once you claim to represent “the oppressed,” you can stop listening to real people. Much progressive “empathy” projects idealized versions of others, erasing cultural differences and treating disagreement as ignorance or prejudice. Adam Smith warned about the “man of system,” who thinks society can be rearranged like chess pieces, ignoring human wills. Dostoevsky argued abstract love is easy; loving real people is hard. Nietzsche described a morality that flatters weakness and condemns what rises above the herd, while Orwell questioned whether some socialist intellectuals truly loved workers or simply used them to vent resentment. Rob Henderson calls these “luxury beliefs”: status-providing ideas for elites that impose costs on those below them. The moral prestige is immediate; the damage unfolds over decades. So “suicidal narcissism” may fit better than “suicidal empathy”: projection, superiority, and power disguised as compassion.

The Tolerance That Censors Institutions preach tolerance, yet disagreement is increasingly punished. As protected classes expand, demands for compliance, surveillance, and reporting grow. A tolerance-saturated society becomes hostile to dissent. Many call it hypocrisy, but the contradiction may be strategy. In 1965, Herbert Marcuse’s *Repressive Tolerance* argued that liberal “equal hearing” can perpetuate oppression. “Liberating tolerance,” he claimed, must discriminate: intolerance toward the Right, tolerance toward the Left. Why? Classical Marxism expected industrial workers to revolt from misery. Instead, comfort increased and revolution stalled. The Frankfurt School offered a remedy: capitalism colonized consciousness, creating “false consciousness.” If factory revolt won’t start, revolution must begin in the formation of minds—culture, education, psychology, entertainment. If so, neutrality becomes the enemy. Free debate spreads the system’s ideas. Elections let prisoners choose their preferred warden. Liberal freedoms act as “steam valves,” releasing pressure to prevent revolt. Tolerance becomes directional: oppressive ideas are suppressed; liberating ideas are amplified. Censorship and punishment are reframed as freedom’s highest expression. Marcuse also recognized liberal resistance to censorship and proposed “emergency” suspensions when oppression is deemed urgent—a logic echoed when speech is treated as harm and coercion as protection. The unsettling possibility is that nothing is malfunctioning: tolerance may function as a weapon. The final stage requires no visible censor—the individual internalizes it, policing their own thoughts.

The Evolution of Modern Leftism Left-wing and woke ideology often presents itself through noble ideas: compassion, justice, equality, and progress. But progress toward what? That question is rarely asked. To understand modern leftism, we must look back nearly 200 years. Ideas evolve like viruses: when society develops resistance to one form, academics modify it until it becomes more contagious, destructive, and difficult to recognize. Hegel proposed the dialectic: opposing ideas—a thesis and antithesis—collide to produce a synthesis. Marx applied this framework to economics through dialectical materialism. He viewed history as a struggle between the “haves” and “have-nots” and predicted that workers would overthrow capitalism and create a communist utopia. When Marx’s vision failed, Lenin reworked it. He argued that workers needed to be led by an elite revolutionary class. This produced the idea of perpetual revolution: after one oppressor is defeated, the next ruling class becomes the new enemy. The struggle never ends. The Frankfurt School later adapted Marxism for the West. It argued that capitalism’s material success had made workers less receptive to revolution, so the focus shifted to culture, education, media, religion, and the arts. The goal became a gradual “long march through the institutions.” Postmodernists expanded the theory further, arguing that power exists everywhere—not only between rich and poor, but also between men and women, racial groups, heterosexual and homosexual people, and colonizers and the colonized. The personal became political. Intersectionality then presented oppression as a matrix in which every identity adds another layer of victimhood and moral authority. At one extreme is the idealized figure of a poor, disabled, rural, transgender lesbian woman from a developing country. At the other is the supposed ultimate oppressor: a wealthy, educated, able-bodied, straight, white, cisgender, Christian, Western man living in a city. Modern progressivism, in this view, is essentially neo-Marxism in drag.

The Elite Origins of Marxist Revolution Bertrand Russell, a socialist who visited Moscow in 1920, observed that the Bolsheviks resembled religious fanatics more than political theorists. Lenin quoted Marx and Engels as a pastor recites Scripture. In his *History of Western Philosophy*, Russell described the parallels: dialectical materialism replaces God, the Communist Party becomes the church, communist revolution the Second Coming, punishment for capitalists hell, and the communist commonwealth heaven. The *Communist Manifesto* declares that its aims can be achieved only through “the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.” Marx sought to destroy the existing world and assumed that an undefined utopia would rise. If Marxism claims to speak for the oppressed, why has it so often been adopted by elites? Marx came from an upper-middle-class family that owned vineyards and employed servants. Friedrich Engels, his chief supporter and financier, inherited wealth from his family’s textile business. Lenin’s family owned property and employed servants, while Mao Zedong’s family was considerably wealthier than ordinary Chinese peasants. Fidel Castro’s family owned a large estate, Che Guevara came from an affluent background, and Pol Pot’s family had connections to Cambodia’s royal court. Pol Pot encountered Marxism while studying in Paris. These men went on to create, support, or lead revolutions that killed millions of the people they claimed to represent. This was no accident. The *Communist Manifesto* states that “a portion of the bourgeoisie goes over to the proletariat,” especially those who understand “the historical movement as a whole.” Marx therefore incorporated an explanation for his own class position into the movement’s founding text. Lenin expanded this idea, arguing that workers left to themselves could achieve only “trade-union consciousness.” Socialist theory, he believed, had to be brought to them by educated elites—the revolutionary vanguard. Although Marxism and communism are commonly portrayed as movements created for the poor, the men who developed and led them were, almost without exception, members of the elite.

On #EnforcedDisappearances Day, we remember those whose whereabouts remain unknown. @UNESCO tracks verified cases of enforced disappearance and other attacks against journalists and media workers for SDG 16.10.1.🇺🇳 Protecting journalists protects the public’s right to know. https://t.co/hr2WxURJmk #EnforcedDisappearances #journalism #SDG16 #UNESCOdoesnotspecifyanyparticularcountriesinthetweet.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.Ifyouneedfurtherassistance #feelfreetoask!

🇺🇦🇪🇺 RECOGNISE UKRAINIAN QUALIFICATIONS NOW! Europe needs skilled workers. Ukraine has skilled workers. Yet thousands of Ukrainian doctors, nurses, engineers, teachers, technicians, electricians, IT specialists and other professionals are still blocked by bureaucracy and forced https://t.co/NaruDGsIOI #RecognizeUkrainianQualifications #SkilledWorkers #SupportUkraine #UA #EU

🇪🇺 EUROPE NEEDS A LABOUR MARKET REVOLUTION Europe is running out of workers, companies cannot find staff, families struggle to combine children and careers, and governments still punish work with some of the highest taxes in the world. The answer is not more bureaucracy. The https://t.co/VuVgLMSL1o #LabourMarket #Europe #WorkRevolution #EU

🇪🇺 EUROPE NEEDS A LABOUR MARKET REVOLUTION Europe is running out of workers, companies cannot find staff, families struggle to combine children and careers, and governments still punish work with some of the highest taxes in the world. The answer is not more bureaucracy. The https://t.co/4ddnUOTL2t #LabourMarket #Europe #WorkRevolution #EU

Currently, 17, 18 and 19 year old workers can legally be paid just 70%, 80% or 90% of the minimum wage, respectively. Apprentices of any age can be paid even less than this - in their first year, only a shocking 56% of the minimum wage. It's why we introduced a bill to fix this. #MinimumWage #FairPay #YouthEmployment #Thetweetdoesnotmentionanyspecificcountries.Therefore #therearenocountrycodestoreturn.

SpaceX has just officially announced Starbase, Louisiana, a new $100+ billion spaceport in South Louisiana near Pecan Island. Construction starts in 2027, with the first Starship launch from the new site planned for 2029. Starbase, Louisiana will be built to support thousands of Starship flights a year. This self-sustaining spaceport will have propellant production, power generation, deep-water shipping capabilities, vehicle processing facilities, and an airport. SpaceX is committed to investing at least $100 billion and creating more than 3,000 new jobs at Starbase, Louisana hiring heavily from nearby communities and utilizing Louisiana workers’ extensive experience of building complex infrastructure in their unique environment. In Vermilion Parish, the shoreline is eroding between 3.3 and 23 feet per year. SpaceX is partnering with state and federal agencies to expand Louisiana’s Coastal Master Plan and Coastal Wetlands Planning, Protection and Restoration Act projects, including Gulf shoreline protection breakwaters designed to reduce wave energy and slow loss along the Gulf edge. https://x.com/SawyerMerritt/status/2092285684333625550

Around 130 BIL employees are due to transfer to Kyndryl on September 1. But according to OGBL and LCGB, Kyndryl already knew about a social plan affecting at least 24 employees weeks before the transfer. Workers deserve full transparency! ☝🏻 #WorkerRights #LabourLaw #Kyndryl #BIL #WorkerRights #Kyndryl #LabourLaw #LU