i don't watch tv. at all. in fact, i don't even have a tv. i watch a fair amount of youtube, and i do keep up with jon stewart via youtube, which is largely nostalgic.

i don't think stephen colbert is very funny, myself. his schtick back in the day was impressive, but i don't think he's really transitioned well out of the persona and into a real person. i used to watch a lot of conan o'brien when i was a kid, and largely walked away from the entire concept of late night when he got screwed over. i don't keep up with any of them.

my read on the situation is that 11:30 is no longer a good time slot. young people today want to go to bed earlier, so they can wake up earlier and check their phones. i think that late night tv is misunderstanding this change in scheduling behaviour. people used to get up, fall out of bed, drag a comb across their head, find their way downstairs and drink a cup, look up, notice they were late, find their coat, grab their hat and make the bus in seconds flat. they don't that anymore. nowadays, they get up, roll over and stare at their phone for an hour before they fall out of bed. so, they have to go to bed early enough to get up to check their feeds.

that means that what colbert really lost out on was scheduling. it's too late at night, nowadays.

that doesn't mean that you just time-shift it like you're solving a relativity problem. the tv day is shorter, now, because people have phones; they used to spend 15 hours on tv, and now will spend 8 or 10. if you want to survive on actual tv (and not just youtube), you need a better time slot.

anarchism is not about abolishing government, it's about abolishing the state, which is a different thing. the idea is that you replace the state with democracy; you replace the state with a government.

definitions of the state are inexact. it's a similar idea to what the right calls the "deep state"; anarchists just call that the state. abolishing the state means abolishing private property (in the means of production). it means collectivizing production. it means democratizing everything. it means taking power away from an unelected upper class and giving it to the masses of people, instead.

the system of government sometimes called "market libertarianism" is not anarchism in any coherent sense, but is in truth fascism in disguise, as you need a totalitarian state to apply the market theory, and the aims and goals of such a system very quickly fall off into social darwinism and then nazism, if left to develop unchecked.

i've written a lot about this (it's all on the side), but it's coming up again so i want to summarize.

i frequently criticize free market ideology and people advancing and pushing free market ideology. it's the ideology of market theory that i'm railing against, and people that want to advance it and implement it. 

the question of whether we really live in free market capitalism is incoherent nonsense. free markets are impossible. if you abolished the government, you'd end up in hobbesian exploitation, and primitive feudalism. you need a government to define the rules to implement a market; markets are not natural, do not exist in the real world and cannot exist or function outside of government dominance and control. governments and markets are the same thing. it's up to the government to determine what kind of market it wants to create.

one example of this is antitrust legislation. if you took away the state, are the corporations going to compete? no, they're going to collude, because it's in their self-interest to collude. so, you need a government to step in and actually force them to compete. in the 50s and 60s, as a response to communism, you started seeing government psy-ops develop to try to engineer a population that was more competitive and less co-operative, so that they could actually have capitalism, which our human nature towards cooperative behaviour otherwise makes very hard. the government had to redesign us to be more competitive through social engineering and force us to compete by threat of violence in order to enforce capitalism on us. free markets? it's a joke.

many years ago, brezhnev set off a sarcastic response in the academic left by using the term really existing socialism to describe what we today call state capitalism. very quickly, the useful idiots in american media started talking about really existing capitalism. this remains the best way to talk about western capitalism. all capitalism is necessarily state capitalism, because capitalism can't function without a state to enforce it. we don't have a theory of capitalism the way we have a theory of socialism, because capitalism inherently contradicts itself, making coherent theory impossible. it's supposed to implode. right?

this is the irony of the western discourse; socialism actually seems pretty realistic and pretty easy to accomplish if we can tear down a few barriers, but capitalism doesn't work and is completely impossible. it's a pipe dream.

they don't teach you this in school, they just hand you 1984 and tell you to figure it out yourself.

however, it needs to be pointed out that, in the years since, attempts to apply free market ideology to western state capitalism have resulted in increasingly targeted applications of the flawed ideology of capitalism, so that really existing capitalism is probably about as close as the fuckers are ever going to get. if they ever tore down the state, their market would evaporate in ten minutes, but a totalitarian state enforcing market ideology by violence on a population that doesn't want it (this is not socialism, it's fascism) can potentially get them to the outcome they want, and we're pretty close to that in the west. 

a functioning real left understands that religion is the greatest root cause and the more fundamental problem. capitalism is a consequence of religion, and not the other way around. you have to abolish religion before you can abolish capitalism.

for that reason, the biggest enemy of the real left is often not the capitalist right but increasingly the bourgeois left, which poses it the biggest threat, in the form of tacit acceptance of religion as something to be tolerated in a free society.

let's be clear about this.

standing up for religion is not and is never left wing. standing up for religion is always conservatism and always right wing. no exceptions.

the left always advances secularism and always advances a post-religious society. it's foundational. it's definitional. religion is not compatible with a coherent left and cannot be tolerated or welcomed or accepted by a functioning left.

a left that interacts with religion as acceptable is a right in disguise, and that's been the case on this continent for a long time.