Matisyahu's Blog

Woke up this morning and went for an 8km walk – the weather was a little overcast but it was comfortable weather to go walking in. When I came back home I watched a few YouTube videos to catch up on the news and then grabbed lunch – Tuna & Quinoa Asian Style and two packets of roasted seaweed. What I am doing now is keeping a food diary to keep track of the calories at each meal and recording it into the Apple Journal with each day having its own entry in the journal so then I can keep track of how things are progressing. The benefit of having that journal is s that I conscious of what I eat during the day and recording when I eat – am I eating because I’m bored or am I eating because I’m actually hungry?

Just before I started writing my blog I was watching a video from a YouTuber that I watch because although I don’t always agree with everything he does have some interesting takes. Tonight however I have to admit I disagreed with his assessment of the left wing within the United States – and the end of the day you can have a fit of righteous indignation and feel very smug about being perfect and pure but if at the end of the day you have nothing to show for it other than being smug then I have to ask what is it all for?

If you want to engage in transformation politics then you need to build up a coalition of the working class that is bought together through the shared economic interests of the working class. Part of the coalition building means you have to meet people where they are, it also means that some things that are important may need to be on the back burner until such point that you have mass support needed to not only address the material conditions of the here and now but also the ‘big picture’ issues. The failure to address those material conditions creates fertile grounds for reactionary forces to claim that the left is obsessed with xyz at the expense of ‘real issues’.

This is the reason why I’m dismissive of people over on the New Zealand subreddit who whine on a near constant basis of how the Green Party should stick to environmentalism and leave the social and economic issues to one side. The problem with such thinking is that firstly the environment, social issues and economic issues are intrinsically tied together (you can’t address the environmental issues without examining the economic model etc). The second issue is that if you don’t deal with the material conditions that the working class face then you run the risk of once again reactionary forces will claim that the Green Party is more interested in environmentalism as a new age religion rather than dealing with the ‘real issues’.

I think the reason why this issue raised online was because of a recent interview of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez where she raised the issue of Woke 1.0 vs Woke 2.0 – the excesses of Woke 1.0 leading to the reactionary backlash then the return of woke in the form of Woke 2.0. It is all very well to parade up mainstream talking about ‘defund the police’ and ‘abolish ice’ but what does that actually mean in terms of actionable policy? when regular people aka ‘normies’ hear ‘defund the police’ what is actually going through their minds – something tells me that the moment ‘defund the police’ is chanted that the regular person hearing such a chant the first thing that comes to mind is chaos, anarchy, crime, violence etc. I hope that what was said in the interview is a sign that the left in the United States are thinking strategically so that it is possible to win then engage in transforming the system for the better rather than engaging in empty virtue signally and moral posturing.

I’m back using Safari after giving my installation a good cleaning – I logged into recover, mounted the data drive then opened the terminal to then navigate to the Library directory to clear out all the contents. Once all that was done I rebooted, logged back in and signed into my iCloud account then installed uBlock Origin Lite which had been updated to 2026.812.1211. Everything is going smoothly at the moment and there are reports of Apple working on a 26.6.2 update for macOS and a 26.6.1 update for iOS and from what the rumour mill is reporting it will be focusing on security fixes – I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple is using the same developer tools other big names are using to pick up security holes that have laid undetected for years.