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Welcome to a special, long-form collaboration: The Regrettable Century and VarnVlog combined in our Captain Planet team of pessimism. Today, we are opening up a comprehensive multi-part investigation into New York Times columnist Ross Douthat's landmark 2020 thesis, The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victim of Our Own Success.

Drawing its name and conceptual infrastructure from Jacques Barzun’s classic From Dawn to Decadence, Douthat’s work defines a decadent society not as a spectacular moral collapse, but as an advanced state of structural stasis. It is a condition where a society remains remarkably wealthy off of past advancement and technologically proficient off of prior development—what Marxists would define as the crushing weight of dead labor—yet is fundamentally unable to advance any further economically, scientifically, or culturally.

Douthat paradoxically kicks off his book by quoting Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci on the interregnum—the morbid symptoms that emerge when the old is dying and the new cannot be born. We seize on this crossover, exposing a fascinating systemic reality: modern post-liberal, distributist, and traditionalist conservatives are quietly haunted by the exact same structural trends that Marx tracked via the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. They observe secular stagnation all around them, yet must look to Aristotle, Ibn Khaldun, Adam Smith, or David Ricardo to describe it because they are ideologically barred from admitting Marx was right.

We parse through the first major horseman of the book—Stagnation—and apply it to our 2026 material realities:

The Let's-Pretend Economy: We re-read Douthat's pre-COVID evaluation of tech "unicorns" like Uber and WeWork. We map how this pattern of "let's pretendism" has seamlessly mutated into the massive generative AI and large language model (LLM) bubble—where over-inflated tech valuations run on billions of dollars of burning venture capital while generating zero real-world productivity growth.

The Chip Monopoly Mirage: Why the only true driver of physical profitability in the Magnificent Seven stock cluster remains the actual commodity production of silicon chips, while the rest of the tech ecosystem functions as an elite real-estate leasing scam.

The Demography Bomb: A preliminary look at the collapse of global social reproduction. We track why the aging out of the Baby Boomers and the severe contraction of global birth rates have left the imperial core, Europe, and China facing identical structural resource deadlocks.

The Geopolitical Quagmire: How the escalating cost structures of the permanent arms economy prevent the Western core from manufacturing basic munitions efficiently, trapping modern empires into proxy-war management.

We strip away the shallow, vibes-based discourse of the modern culture wars to map out the long-durée arc of a global system running out of track.

Read the history, check the material baselines, and protect your peace.

 

Douthat, Ross. The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success. New York: Avid Reader Press, 2020.

 

Support our collaborative efforts on Patreon:

VarnVlog: https://www.patreon.com/varnvlog

Economic D-Day, Iran Strikes Back, US Army Secretary Resigns in Protest, Iran's Financial Situation, Azov on the Rise, The Zionist/Ukrainian Nazi Alliance, Inter-Agency Intel War in Kiev, Russia Advances...

 

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This week the dudes and the patrons got together to chill and discuss the overall vibes in the world.

 

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This week the boys sat down with Dean and Matt from The Magnificast to discuss their new book.  From the editor:

Capitalism's excessive patterns of production and consumption are fueling the biggest existential threat to humanity: climate change. The central assumption of our current economic system puts economic growth before all other values. But infinite growth on a finite planet is fundamentally impossible. We must embrace the idea of degrowth.

With a name like "degrowth," misunderstandings are easy to come by, like assuming degrowth is about austerity or population control; on the contrary, degrowth means rejecting economic growth as the measure for social progress, such that we might grow other parts of our social life and ourselves. The problem isn't too few resources or too many people; it's capitalism's system of growth. Enough Is Enough argues that the economic and theological directions offered by liberation theology give us a unique paradigm for Christians to question the hegemony of growth. In a moment of climate crisis, Christians can orient themselves according to alternative values rooted in a relationship with creation that sees all creatures as siblings.

Degrowth encourages us to expand our imaginations beyond a fixation on growth for growth's sake, to discover ways of organizing our societies according to different values. It's time for us to say, "Enough is enough," and to accept that if we abandon our drive for growth, we will discover there is already enough to go around.

 

Buy the book from Fortress Press

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Pentagon Wants to Retreat From the Persian Gulf, Shipping Chaos Threatens World Food Supply, Arms Manufacture Scam, Mossad Iran Purge, Israel Bombs Turkish Assets in Syria, Royal Navy Too Small and Weak, Ukraine Drone War Failure and Russian Breakthroughs...  

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This week Jason and Kevin got together to do a close read the document that is causing American Conservatives to lose their minds, the new program of the Democratic Socialists of America.

 

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In this episode the boys continue their ongoing discussion of the influences of popular-socialism, folk-socialism, left-populism, and left-nationalism on the western workers' movement and how to navigate the impossible task of resurrecting the "Real Marxist" tradition. 

 

The Problem With Left Nationalism

https://jacobin.com/2026/01/left-nationalism-universalism-populism-melenchon 

 

The Left and Its Meaning

https://sublationmedia.com/the-left-and-its-meaning/

 

Folk Socialism — A Left-Populist Disorder 

https://www.historicalmaterialism.org/article/folk-socialism-a-left-populist-disorder/ 

 

A Socialism for the 21st Century

https://truthout.org/articles/a-socialism-for-the-21st-century/ 

 

Neoliberalism and the Socialist Movement in Britain: From the Third Road to Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit

https://mronline.org/2024/09/11/neoliberalism-and-the-socialist-movement-in-britain-from-the-third-road-to-jeremy-corbyn-and-brexit/

 

Marxist Internationalism or National Interest?

https://www.theleftchapter.com/post/marxist-internationalism-or-national-interest 

 

People, class, democracy: re-mapping left populism from populist social democracy to popular socialism 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13569317.2024.2371506#d1e175 

  This week, two old veterans of about two and a half decades in the fight against half a dozen imperialist wars read and discussed an article about why there is not anti-war movement.  

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Iran War Strategic Summary, Iran and Oman Hormuz Agreement, The US is Out of Missiles, China Missile Practice on US Ship Models, Ukraine Bombs Restaurant, Ukraine 40 Day Drone War Failure, Ukraine Counteroffensive Failure, Ukraine Out of Air Defense Missiles...

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This week we continue our series on republicanism by returning to an episode we did on the complicated legacy of the American Revolution. This older episode now has a 40 minute preface where we discuss the episode and how much things have changed since the original, enjoy!  Like the bourgeois project as a whole, the historical consequences of the American Revolution have had mixed results. Simultaneously spurring on the cause of human freedom and stifling it, the American Revolution was pregnant with a creative and destructive spirit. As the American Empire appears to be in decline, we ask whether or not things could have gone, or could still go, in another direction. Check out Matthew and Jason's Podcast About the History of the Soviet Union: https://regrettablecentury.podbean.com/e/introducing-the-unbreakable-union-podcast-the-contemporary-importance-of-soviet-history/ 

War and Revolution: Rethinking the 20th Century https://thecharnelhouse.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/domenico-losurdo-war-and-revolution-rethinking-the-twentieth-century.pdf 

Historical Revisionism and Delegitimation of the Revolutionary and Anticolonial Tradition—A Review of War and Revolution https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21598282.2016.1172752 

Liberals and Reactionaries http://www.leninology.co.uk/2011/10/liberals-and-reactionaries.html 

From Karl Marx to the Fourth of July https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2010/07/inde-j03.html

THE MYTH OF THE “CONSERVATIVE REVOLUTION” https://socialistworker.org/2011/12/14/myth-of-the-conservative-revolution 

Communist and Neo-Babouvist readings of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution https://www.academia.edu/38110441/_Communist_and_Neo_Babouvist_readings_of_the_Enlightenment_and_the_French_Revolution_in_E_Vallance_ed_Remembering_Early_Modern_Revolutions_London_Routledge_2018 

JD Vance Admits Epstein Was Mossad and Israel Derailed Negotiations, Pentagon Budget Crisis, US Weapons Shortage, Failure and Firings in Ukraine...

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This week the boys all got together to do a bonus episode about the current state of the republic. We are clearly ailing as a society and we are clearly in trouble as a country. Will the decline of the empire lead to the fall of the republic?

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This week we sat down with our comrade Brad, a union organizer and CPUSA member, to discuss an article he wrote about two conflicting visions of radical change at the heart of the unfinished American Revolution and its implications for the contemporary workers' movement. 

 

Abolition Democracy or Reconstruction Democracy? Working-Class Leadership and the Unfinished Democratic Revolution

https://newjubileenotes.substack.com/p/abolition-democracy-or-reconstruction 

Israel Tried to Assassinate Iran's Negotiators, The Abysmal State of US Oil Reserves, The War is Back the Strait is Closed, Ukraine on the Brink, Russian Advance Slowed but Ukrainian Losses Surge...  

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We continue our month long series on American Communism by doing a close read and discussion of two articles about the Communist Party of the United States of America's role as the cutting edge of liberatory politics in the mid 20th century.

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*The first version of this episode was only an hour long for some reason. We've re-uploaded the full episode which is a half hour longer.* For America's 250th birthday, the boys got together to discuss the legacy of the American Revolution. There are two major poles of thought on the American left, with wildly differing interpretations of the American Revolution. They both make some good points, we discuss those here. 

 

The Social and Intellectual Legacy of the American Revolution

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/essays/social-and-intellectual-legacy-american-revolution 

 

Ken Burns Makes the Case for the Greatness of 1776

https://jacobin.com/2026/05/ken-burns-american-revolution-history 

 

Class Struggle Was a Crucial Part of the American Revolution

https://jacobin.com/2026/05/american-revolution-britain-class-struggle 

 

Radical historian challenges traditional Marxist view of ‘so-called’ American Revolution

https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/radical-historian-challenges-traditional-marxist-view-of-so-called-american-revolution/

 

The Conquest of Power, Chapter 2: The American Revolution

https://www.marxists.org/archive/weisbord/conquest2.htm

Last week's British race riots were largely organized by a rising movement of affiliated neo-Nazi organizations called Active Clubs. It should surprise no one that they have direct links to Ukraine. This week we do a close read of an article from the Azov Lobby Blog and discuss the outsized impact of Ukraine's Azov movement on global neo-Nazism. Join the Regrettable Century Patreon

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This week we invited Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn to talk about their new book, The People are Not One: Socialist Strategy After Left Populism.  From the publisher:

In The People Are Not One, Daniel Tutt and C. Derick Varn dismantle the central illusion of contemporary left politics: that “the people” can serve as a coherent subject of emancipation. Against both right and left populisms, they argue that this fantasy of unity obscures real class antagonisms and traps socialism in a dead-end politics of moral appeal and electoral maneuver.

Through a sustained critique of left-populism, post-Marxist theory, and Democratic Party–oriented socialism, Tutt and Varn show how the collapse of mass politics, alongside debates over the professional-managerial class and the atomization of working-class life, has produced a strategic impasse on the left.

What follows is not a lament but a provocation: a call to abandon populist shortcuts and rebuild socialist strategy on the terrain of class struggle as it actually exists—uneven, divided, and politically unformed. The People Are Not One is a manifesto for a post-populist left willing to confront fragmentation head-on and begin the long work of reconstructing class power. https://www.revolpress.com/people-not-one

https://danieltutt.com/

https://www.patreon.com/cw/varnvlog 

Trump Threatens Iran and Backs Down Again, US Intel Upgrades Israel's Espionage Threat Level, Israel's Plans For Radical Militarization and Autarky, Sy Hersh Says Trump Wanted to Use Nukes on Iran, Ukraine's Long Range Strikes Aren't Going to Win the War...  

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Welcome back to Boundless and Bottomless Seas. In this episode, we finally cross the finish line of Alexander Dugin’s infamous text, The Fourth Political Theory.

While Dugin frames himself as the ultimate adversary to Western postmodernism, a close, line-by-line reading reveals a wild, contradictory smoothie of ideas. We put it all in the blender: Soviet Marxism, radical traditionalism, Carl Schmitt's friend-enemy distinction, a heavy dose of Martin Heidegger, and a few tablespoons of pure Infowars-level internet mysticism.

We dive deep into the messy world of his conflicting translations and the obscure concepts found in his appendices:

Political Post-Anthropology: How the shift from a "political subject" to mere "political identification" has reduced modern politics to passive fandom and LARPing.

The Metaphysics of Chaos vs. Logos: Dugin's bizarre, quasi-Gnostic argument that "Logos" has expired and that humanity's only savior is an embrace of "pre-ontological chaos."

The Cult Bullshit Filter: We analyze why his philosophy reads less like a coherent geopolitical strategy and more like an intellectual trap designed to turn 1990s English majors into reactionaries.

We wrap up our thoughts on Dugin and preview what’s next on our summer reading list as we shift gears toward American conservative fusionism, movement conservatism, and eating our vegetables with Russell Kirk and Leo Strauss.

 

Dugin, Alexander (2012). The Fourth Political Theory. Translated by Sleboda, Mark; Millerman, Michael. Arktos Media.

 

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This week Arnold from Fight Like an Animal joins us to talk about his new book Fight Like an Animal: Revolutionary Biology in Defense of Life.

From the Publisher's Site: The stories we tell matter, especially when we aren't aware we're telling them, or how they shape our behavior. In Fight Like an Animal, Arnold Schroder argues that all modern conceptions of politics, from anarchism to fascism, exhibit a shared confusion. All are based on some form of the nature-nurture binary: the idea that human behavior is either biologically or socially-determined, and that the more it is biological, the less it is social. This idea is not simply wrong, but logically incoherent. We can only adapt to so many different kinds of society through a highly-structured biology, which we should seek to understand if we wish to find new ways of living.

Based on decades of immersion in the environmental movement, Fight Like an Animal describes how largely-forgotten debates about human nature still have concrete impacts on political projects today. When we escape the confusion they cause, we can direct our attention to something that should be obvious: individual differences in political personality. Political personality is the core orientation to the world from which specific political behaviors and perceptions emerge. We must ask how different kinds of people shape societies in different ways, and how people are shaped, in turn, by the societies they create. Neither of these questions make sense in isolation: they are endlessly entangled.

Using this integrative framework, Schroder offers simple, readily-accessible tools for conceiving of social change processes and crafting strategic initiatives, whether for a book club or a global revolution. Applying insights gained everywhere from oil refinery blockades to baboon stress hormone profiles, Fight Like an Animal is an earnest argument that, no matter how mired in darkness and confusion, the world can make sense.

 

https://www.againsttheinternet.com/

https://severedbranchespress.com/

Trump Backs Down From Renewed War With Iran, NATO Rejects Mandatory Ukraine Tax, Israel Wants Holocaust Denier to Rule Iran, Latvian Government Collapses, US Does Israel's Fighting, Ukraine's Losses Higher Than Russia In 2026 So Far, Territorial Gain Discrepancies...

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Finally, the long-awaited end of 'Disaster Nationalism' by Richard Seymour. The gang dives into the final chapters of this amazing book. https://www.versobooks.com/products/3147-disaster-nationalism?srsltid=AfmBOopteajdHFhvPPMqXAdXY-mHaQbhDVu5iClxBvNpDm57Jdetk0kH

 

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As socialists, what should we think about conspiracy theories? Should the myriad secret diabolical acts perpetrated by the elites lead us to be more open minded toward the ravings of the open-minded so-called "lunatic fringe," Or does it even matter whether the theories are true?  

Comments on the Society of the Spectacle https://files.libcom.org/files/Comments%20on%20the%20Society%20of%20the%20Spectacle.pdf

 

Conspiracy Theory Is Dead https://jacobin.com/2023/05/conspiracy-theory-is-dead

 

Conspiracies: Left vs Right https://theramparts.substack.com/p/conspiracies-the-left-vs-right 

 

Understanding and Addressing the Rise of Conspiracy Theories in the 21st Century https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ssqu.70050?af=R 

 

What do socialists say about conspiracy theories? https://socialistalternative.info/2024/08/16/what-do-socialists-say-about-conspiracy-theories/ 

 

Conspiracy-Theory Socialism https://fee.org/articles/conspiracy-theory-socialism/ 

 

How the Left Lost Its Mind https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/liberal-fever-swamps/530736/

 

Why Is Conspiratorial Thinking More Popular on the Right? https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/social-justice-pacifists/202110/why-is-conspiratorial-thinking-more-popular-the-right 

 

What Conspiracy Theories on the Left and Right Have in Common https://www.vice.com/en/article/what-conspiracy-theories-on-the-left-and-right-have-in-common/ 

 

How the Left Fools Themselves Into Thinking the Right Are Conspiracy Theorists https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2020/07/23/how_the_left_fools_themselves_into_thinking_the_right_are_conspiracy_theorists.html 

F-35s With no Radar, US Pulling Troops From Europe, Chinese Solar Exports Soar, Iran Is a Massive Strategic Defeat For the US, Israel's Government Is Crumbling, Vehicle and Territory Losses In Ukraine...  

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This week's bonus episode is the second and last part of our close read close read of a 2021 article from Current Affairs titled What Is Fascism—And Why the Definition Matters by Abel Sterling. We found some merit in this article and decided it would form the basis of a good discussion.

 

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This week, the boys got together to finish the discussion about what appears to be a massive shift in the way the global system is ordered. Will it be better? Likely not.  Will it present opportunities for rupture? Hopefully. 

 

Why Is There No Antiwar Movement in the US?

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/iran-us-antiwar-movement-trump 

 

Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster 

https://archive.ph/gEEBj  

 

The decline of the West and the rise of ‘the Rest’ will lead to a new world order

https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2025-09/decline-west-and-rise-rest-will-lead-new-world-order 

 

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Jason and Varn are back and discussing Dugin again. As the discussion of the book inches closer to conclusion, this discussion moves into Dugin's ideas about Fascism, Liberalism, and Communism and the need to transcend these ideologies in the 21st century before moving into the Heideggerian foundations of Dugin's thought.  

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Check Out Varn Vlog

This week, the boys got together to talk about what appears to be a massive shift in the way the global system is ordered. Will it be better? Likely not.  Will it present opportunities for rupture? Hopefully. 

 

Why Is There No Antiwar Movement in the US?

https://jacobin.com/2026/03/iran-us-antiwar-movement-trump 

 

Welcome to a Multidimensional Economic Disaster 

https://archive.ph/gEEBj  

 

The decline of the West and the rise of ‘the Rest’ will lead to a new world order

https://www.chathamhouse.org/publications/the-world-today/2025-09/decline-west-and-rise-rest-will-lead-new-world-order 

 

This Is the Way a World Order Ends 

https://archive.ph/9bEI6

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This week's bonus episode is a close read of an article from Current Affairs titled What Is Fascism—And Why the Definition Matters by Abel Sterling. We found some merit in this article and decided it would form the basis of a good discussion. Stay tuned for part two.

 

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In part VI the boys discuss theories of "decadence" as viewed by the Aufheben collective.

We focus on their early contributions to Marxist theory, critique of the state, and their eventual decline.

 

Note: Within days of recording this, the Iran war broke out, but this was recorded a few days before that started. 

Key Topics Discussed:

The Roots of Aufheben: How the collective emerged within the landscape of radical Marxist theory.

Critique of Luxemburgism: Why Aufheben rejected theories of automatic economic collapse in favor of a more nuanced understanding of class struggle.

The Decay of Theory: Analyzing the shifts in the collective’s perspective that signaled a move away from their original radical foundations.

Theoretical Implications: How these debates on the "highest stage" of capitalism and the "rentier state" remain relevant in today's shifting global landscape.

https://www.patreon.com/c/varnvlog/posts

Trump's Big Nothingburger Speech, US Testing Weapons on Iranian Children, Gulf Arabs Want US Bases Out, India Importing Iranian Oil, US Casualty Coverup, Iranian Missiles are 80% Successful, Hezbollah is Taking a Huge Toll on Israel, Ukraine Desertion and Manpower Crisis...

 

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This week, we read an article by inveterate shitlib, defender of liberal imperialism, and misunderstander of history, Jonathan Rauch. Rauch has changed his mind about Trump being a fascist, and we are here to tell him he shouldn't have... https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/america-fascism-trump-maga-ice/685751/

 

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This week, the Regrettable Christian Caucus tackles Chapter III of Laudato Si' by the late Pope Francis. You can follow along by grabbing the PDF from Verso or from the Vatican website. 

This Papal Encyclical calls for urgent action to address the global environmental crisis, critiques consumerism, blind developmentalism, inequality, and profit seeking. The document calls for global political solidarity to transition to a sustainable economy and for the protection of the world's most vulnerable populations. 

Read Along Here:

https://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html 

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The Stumbling Bumbling War Crimes Clown Show, US to Lift Sanctions on Iranian and Russian Oil, Global Energy Output Severely Reduced For Years, Plans For Forever War, Earthquake Faction, Ukraine Joins the Axis of Genocide, and Yes, They are Still Losing...

 

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  This week Chris and Jason read and discuss two articles about the rearrangement of the global order. Multipolarity is here; will it be better or worse for peace, stability, profits, or the project for human liberation?    

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Colored Revolutions: A New Form of Regime Change, Made in the USA https://www.globalresearch.ca/colored-revolutions-a-new-form-of-regime-change-made-in-the-usa/27061 

 

Can the West Still Engineer a ‘Color Revolution’? We’re About to Find Out https://eng.globalaffairs.ru/articles/color-revolution-lukyanov/  

 

Why a Decade of Protests Didn’t Lead to Revolution https://jacobin.com/2024/01/vincent-bevins-interview-mass-protests-2010s-arab-spring-euromaidan 

 

New report unveils how CIA schemes color revolutions around the world https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202305/1290090.shtml 

 

Nepal's color revolution: US funding under scrutiny amid country's political upheaval https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/09/17/755176/nepal-color-revolution-us-funding-under-scrutiny-amid-political-upheaval 

 

How Color Revolution Was Born—and Died—in Serbia https://www.compactmag.com/article/how-color-revolution-was-born-and-died-in-serbia/

 

Protests in Kazakhstan: A Color Revolution or a Working-Class Uprising? https://internationalviewpoint.org/Protests-in-Kazakhstan-A-Color-Revolution-or-a-Working-Class-Uprising 

Inside the Syrian Revolution and what the Left must do https://internationalviewpoint.org/Inside-the-Syrian-Revolution-and-what-the-Left-must-do

The Epstein Alliance is at War With Iran... and its Not Going Well, Zelensky Threatens to Invade Hungary, Russian Casualty Figures are Inflated, Ukraine is Losing the War... Still

 

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This week, the boys got together and discussed the perpetual battle between the digital Stalinists and the digital Third Campists. To what extent have those demonized as tankies been right or wrong? To what extent do any of these archaic political designations matter?

 

New Tankies and Digital Neo-Stalinism: How the Conservative Left is Incubated

https://europe-solidaire.org/spip.php?article73701

 

Don’t Be a Tankie: How the Left Should Respond to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

https://theintercept.com/2022/03/01/ukraine-russia-leftists-tankie/ 

 

What Is a Tankie-and Why You Don’t Want to Be One

https://medium.com/@ksutherland2727.ks/what-is-a-tankie-and-why-you-dont-want-to-be-one-0fb84611233a 

 

Everything you ever wanted to know about tankies, but were afraid to ask

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/various-authors-always-against-the-tanks#toc2 

 

Why are ‘anti-imperialists’ defending dictators? 

https://www.972mag.com/tankies-left-authoritarians-imperialism/ 

 

The ‘Anti-Imperialism’ of Idiots

https://itsgoingdown.org/the-anti-imperialism-of-idiots/ 

 

JFK Files Reveal CIA Role in the 1956 Hungarian Uprising

https://www.joewrote.com/p/jfk-files-reveal-the-cia-role-in

 

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Keep up with Burkina Faso, Trump is Killing Cuba, Iran is a Formidable Opponent, Iranian Dead Protester Psyop, Pedophile Country Provides Security for Epstein, Spook Dictators on the Rise in Ukraine, The Ukrainian Counteroffensive that Wasn't...

 

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Finally, the long awaited return of 'Disaster Nationalism' by Richard Seymour. The gang dives into chapters three and four. Catch up with us by joining the Discord.

 

From the publisher:  Liberal civilization is in crisis - now is a time of monsters.

While the spotlight often shines on the actions of charismatic right-wing leaders such as Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro, defeating these people will not stem the tide behind them. They are the embodiment of profound forces that are rarely understood. With meticulous analysis and compelling storytelling, Richard Seymour delves into the ideologies fueling the contemporary right and distorting modern politics into something abhorrent and nihilistic. The battle against disaster nationalism is not just political; it is a struggle for our collective soul and the future of civilization. 

 

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This week, we returned to a discussion about a not very well-known article from an obscure Trotskyist journal written over a decade ago...  It generated a little bit of a buzz, but was mostly ignored. We think that was a mistake, and we are going to tell you all about why you should care about the decisions of the 10th Party Congress of the Russian Communist Party. You won't want to miss this episode.  The Article in Question:  The Red Jacobins: Thermidor and the Russian Revolution in 1921 

 

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The Greenland Nothingburger, Regime Change in Iran Wouldn't be Quick or Easy, Epstein Was Mossad, Epstein in Ukraine, Ukraine's Internal and Military Collapse... Join the Regrettable Century Patreon

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The boys are back and are nearing the end of the book. Chapters 11 and 12 are where Dugin's animating principle of "Dasein" comes into conflict with his understanding of global geopolitics and the project of "Fourth Political Praxis."

Work Cited: Dugin, Alexander (2012). The Fourth Political Theory. Translated by Sleboda, Mark; Millerman, Michael. Arktos Media.

 

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This is a repost of an episode from 2003, but with an added leadoff that we recorded recently.

 

This episode discusses a topic that bears constant revisiting: our pessimism (because of intellect) and our optimism (because of will). No, it's not just a doomer affectation that we can use to sound as cool as we look; it's a critical method of engaging with the bleak reality that faces us. The only way out is through, but getting through is possible. Revolutionary Pessimism: The Worst is Yet to Come https://www.christiansocialism.com/2020/05/12/covid-peter-fleming-revolutionary-pessimism-capitalism/ Pessimism of the Will https://viewpointmag.com/2020/05/28/pessimism-of-the-will/ CRITICAL PESSIMISM AND THE LIMITS OF TRADITIONAL MARXISM  https://www.jstor.org/stable/657342 

For A Refresher: The Proper Amount of Bumming People Out: Pessimisms and Optimisms of Intellect and Will https://regrettablecentury.podbean.com/e/the-proper-amount-of-bumming-people-out-pessimisms-and-optimisms-of-intellect-and-will/  Scattered Thoughts on Melancholia and the Organization of Pessimism https://regrettablecentury.podbean.com/e/scattered-thoughts-on-melancholia-and-the-organization-of-pessimism/  Pessimism of the Intellect, Pessimism of the Will https://regrettablecentury.podbean.com/e/pessimism-of-the-intellect-pessimism-of-the-will/https://regrettablecentury.buzzsprout.com/220523/889740-pessimism-of-the-intellect-pessimism-of-the-will Music- Англия - Сказочный мир

This week, we get together to talk through a sort of brief overview of the era of the Pink Tide in Latin America and try to draw out some of the lessons and implications for the future of Socialism for the 21st Century... What Happened to the Pink Tide?

https://jacobin.com/2016/07/pink-tide-latin-america-chavez-morales-capitalism-socialism/ 

 

The Rise and Fall of the Latin American Left

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/the-ebb-and-flow-of-latin-americas-pink-tide/ 

 

What Is Socialism for the Twenty-First Century?

https://monthlyreview.org/2016/10/01/what-is-socialism-for-the-twenty-first-century/ 

 

21st Century Socialism: What It Will Become and Why?

https://ibw21.org/commentary/21st-century-socialism-what-it-will-become-and-why/ 

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Here it is comrades, the long-awaited fourth patron Q&A. We answer questions about America's humiliation, Chinese communism, AI in schools, and our favorite revolutionary books and/or pamphlets. This is only half the questions we received this time, the second half will be posted in Patron Q&A V next week...

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The Iran Regime Change that Wasn't, Canada and China are Pals Now, Greenland Idiocy, Ukraine's Mass Desertion Crisis, Ukraine's Corruption Crisis, Ukraine's Fiscal Crisis, Ukraine's Fortification Crisis, Ukraine's Losing the War Crisis...

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Once again, the boys are back... again. We return to our long-neglected "Decadence Theory" project with Varn Vlog. This week, the boys try to get back in the swing of things with a reorientation episode. 

Varn Vlog

https://www.patreon.com/c/varnvlog/posts

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This week, we finally finish off the a close reading of The Concept of Left by Leszek Kolakowski. 

Kolakowski was a dissident Polish Marxist who later turned against the project altogether. However, before he did, he wrote much that is worth reading. 

 

The Concept of the Left- Leszek Kolakowski 

https://danieltutt.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/concept_of-_the_left_kolakowskileszek.pdf 

 

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