Healthcare: ❎ “No, that’s communism!”
Mandatory Labor: ✅ “Yes, that’s patriotism!”
🙄
Spin universal healthcare as “Those damn overpayed doctors should be forced to support their nation!” and BOOM, patriotism.
I legit believe it can be a matter of choice of words. I mean, for some issues.
Simply describe any leftist position without using charged words and I guarantee most republicans would be on board.
My mom is “pro-life.” I interviewed her on what exactly she believed should be legislated. Turns out she’s 100% pro choice but just doesn’t like abortion.
Most people are like that. It’s really normal to have views from all over the spectrum, not all from one side. Many libertarians maturely face the conundrum that they will always fight for the liberties of others, even if they personally or morally disagree with them. And I’m talking about actual libertarians, not the US “libertarians” their media has.mislabelled and confused.the nation by basically redefining that term to somethung entirely different.
Kentucky fucking hates Obamacare but if you try taking Kentuckycare (Obamacare+the optional stuff every state was offered+a convenient portal) they’ll fucking riot.
I really am disappointed by the amount of highway litter in the otherwise gorgeous state of California.
Careful, that cuts both ways. They decide what they want the words to mean…
We can do both. It will take time and strong, sustained effort. But we can do it.
Socialism/communism = “someone got something that I don’t think they deserved.”
They’re just bad words to people. I think a lot of the “normal people” on the right are just people who are too stupid to understand politics, so it works like their football team. You don’t need to know anything about the Dallas Cowboys or Patriots to hate them. Democrats are bad because they are the other team. We don’t need to know what “woke” means - it’s just a word that describes people on the bad team.
If you manage to avoid the trigger words, and they haven’t been propagandized on whatever specific topic, it’s really easy to convince them to agree with a lot of left leaning ideas.
We could call it “The Large Jump Ahead” or something.
We’re taking all the glasses and killing the birds too right?
No, we’re just going to start using that pesticide that kills bird eggs again.
DDT? That’s that shit that I use on my side of the watershed to keep mosquitoes at bay.i make sure to dump what ever is left from my spay bottles down stream to kill the neighbors mosquitos too
Hell yeah brother! aborted baby eagle screeches
Heaven forbid we improve on the ideas using mistakes as maps and stepping stones!
Save it for your blog. We’re shit posting over here.
I forget, is that before or after we contact the Trisolarians?
Before. This will create the necessary climate for someone to decide ‘fuck it’ and contact them.
For anyone else who didn’t get the joke, I already googled it and figured it out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward
If anyone is curious, I found it using, “Asian jump ahead” 😅
Nice, good job!
kinda abstract, how about “Down to the Good Ol’ Countryside”?
Yeah, not doing volunteer farm work to give private people and corporations free work and profit.
If there were some state-owned ones that the food was used to feed public school kids or others on government programs, maybe.
But no way for someone else’s profit.
Plot twist: America does agricultural collectivization in the 2030s
We already do, I implore you to learn how the omnibus agriculture bill that goes through congress each year actually works. Most food production is entirely government funded, but for some reason a bunch of “profits” also get skimmed off by big corporations. Rural America only exists because of farm subsidies (which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just dumb to pretend like it’s not collectivized and allow leeches to profiteer).
Government subsidies are not the same thing as collectivization. Collectivization implies collective ownership, under Capitalism what you have instead is usually consolidation, where large farms buy up smaller competitors and become less efficient over time. America’s approach to agricultural policy is how you get perverse incentives like speculators buying up land in order to collect government money to not grow anything.
yaaay finally the US can experience famine and starvation as well! 🎉
Finally? Did we forget the great depression and the dust bowl?
Not classified as a famine
Of course it wasn’t. The land of plenty could never suffer from a famine.
Listening to experts because they probably have good reasons for their classification 🙅♂️
Rejecting expert opinions because of my political “America bad” attitude ✅✅✅
In both the Soviet and Chinese famines, collectivized farms outperformed privately owned ones in terms of food produced per hectare. Without collectivization, those famines would have happened anyway, and they would have been worse.
Really? Why did they allow those private farms at all then? My understanding was that the farms that were collectivized only produced enough for themselves to eat, so they went back a little and said “okay, you can have SOME capitalism until we get it figured out”. How they figured it out was quotas, and hey, on paper it looks good. You just have to tell Stalin a good number. Somehow the store room’s still empty.
Who said it’s volunteer work? They’d better be paying me
Your pay has arrived:
You work all day and what do you get?
They certainly didn’t say it was paid work.
Oh, sweetie, that is precious. You are and have been your entire life.
Here is a complete list of farm subsidies you are paying for. The totals are mind bogglingly huge.
“Our” farms? Farms are a publicly owned commodity? I was not aware of this. I’ll tell you what, when you wrest ownership of the farms from agricultural corporations and nationalize them I’ll sign up for a stint on the farm gang. But I’m over 30 so I guess I get a pass? I’m guessing Kelly is over 30 too.
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They want to be angry.
It’s not just them. Everyone wants to be angry. But just sitting around feeding it without channeling it to a productive* end isn’t improving anything.
I don’t want to be angry. I want healthcare, world peace, and then to lie down.
Have you written letters, talked to neighbors, helped any out? Mutual aid, direct action?
What are you doing about it?
I don’t need to be a pilot to know a plane crash is bad.
What are you doing about it?
See how easy this is?
Mutual aid most days, , got my town a Little Free Library (research to installation), keep it stocked, planning a community garden, volunteer with my town distributing free, fresh produce.
The billionaires are in shambles due to your actions. Thank you for your service.
They want to live like how they imagined their grandfathers lived.
But its mostly media lies and misremembered nostalgia
Will they get to keep the produce? Otherwise, this is just slavery and very much in line with conservative ideology again.
When watching the TV Series The Handmaid Tales I kept thinking that things like their very heavy security appartus, military for the continuing seccession war and heavy use of dedicated manpower doing manual work in house chores (at least for the upper classes) would use too much manpower, taking it away from actual productive activities and thus making a modern nation level of life (in the material sense, not other senses) unsustainable, though Gilead could sorta keep going for a while drawing down on the wealth of the part of the US from were it was formed, before falling down to mid-XX century South American levels of wealth or worse.
However temporary slavery like this “national duty field work” might actually “solve” some of the agricultural production manpower shortage problems in such a society.
So it actually makes sense (in a sick way) that it’s appealing to the most extreme Fascist amongst the Republicans.
Where does it say you don’t get paid?
Also, in terms of understanding how things happen, this is definitely not a bad thing.
So many people take everything for granted. I worked a couple of years in agriculture. Long days, tough work. I will never look down on a farmer, and it thought me some neat lessons in life too.
You get paid for jury duty. Making a living off of that? When i read national duty i heard conscription in my head. Maybe because i just assume the idea is as good as the compensation.
Oh maybe I don’t worry about this because I’m not American…
Sorry
I worked on a farm from 23-30 and my body is kinda destroyed now. Had surgery on my wrist, my back hurts all the time. I’m getting arthritis in my fingers and knees. All at the ripe age of 36.
It’s definitely valuable work, but there’s a reason old farmers tend to walk like Arthur Morgan.
Call me naive, but it seems to me that if everyone was pitching in for a season of farm work, less people overall would be doing 8/15/etc consecutive years and getting their bodies destroyed.
It depends on the farm. It’s not completely unskilled labor, especially if you’re dealing with livestock or large machinery like what’s used for harvesting/spreading manure/tilling.
Implementing something like what’s being suggested would require some sort if funding from the government to train people to get ready to do it, and honestly a lot of farmers aren’t going to want a bunch of green farmhands all at the same time. In a lot of cases it’d be more trouble than it’s worth.
Asking someone who has never been on a farm to just jump in on an operation and be helpful is kinda setting everyone up to fail. There’s more to a farm than picking crops and cleaning up animal poop.
I mean, something simple like fixing a fence can be a pain in the ass if you dont know what youre doing. Plus, theres a lot of ways to get hurt or killed if you’re not familiar with the environment.
Where does it say you do get paid?
Maybe in that one aspect, but I’d imagine the mandatory labor at likely very low wages will make most people resent it more than anything.
Is it better to force poor people to work in farms to survive? In a world where a large number of ‘modern’ westernized countries have active military conscription for young people, I don’t see this as being worse than that, either. The thing with slavery, is that it is lifetime, unpaid, terrible conditions, based on a feeling of superiority, only for the targeted groups, etc.
Of course, the better solution is just to treat farm workers fairly and pay them well, and work on automation at the same time. But rich people were forced to work in farms too, the conditions would probably get a whole lot nicer for everyone involved, and it would probably create a pretty big incentive to start automation as well.
edit: to actually be fine, it would have to be run by the govt. on nationally owned farms, like schools are, for workers to be paid and well treated, and for rich people to not be exempt
It was tried back in the 60’s. It failed.
Wow, never heard of this, thank you
Great source, thanks for sharing!
Some choice excerpts:
Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.
“These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn’t have the power or space for the American public to listen to them,” [Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says. “The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren’t able to mask that up.”
She says the A-TEAM “reveals a very important reality: It’s not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It’s about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages.”
And what one dude who went through the program as a 17 year old has to say about it now:
But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.
“There’s nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they’re lazy,” he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, ‘Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.’ "
My reading is that it failed because there was no political will to actually provide for local-born farmers any more than immigrants. And as such, it was doomed to fail from the start.
Caesar Chavez was a goddamn American hero until he sold out.
Rich people will be exempt, of course.
People in University or with University Education will “of course” be exempted from this duty which, by an amazing coincidence will exempt the scions of the rich and upper middle class.
It’s a similar technique as what’s used in not just the US but also countries like the UK to make sure the children of “upper” classes don’t have to endure certain hardships and have enhanced future opportunities even in accessing Upper Education: it’s not at all *cough* *cough* because they’re the children of wealthy parents, it’s purelly because they frequent (expensive) private schools and the children of the poor and working class too when they frequent such schools have access to those things (the “small” detail that the poor and working class cannot actually afford it, remains unsaid).
Whenever a Neoliberal talks about how meritocratic their system is, remember that they defend privatised education, something which as I explained above just means a two tier system were those who can afford it purchase for their children easy access past certain gatekeepers of future opportunities such as access to certain Universities whilst the rest are in a different track - the state school system - with far lower chances, all of which is the very opposite of a merit-based system.
Yes, usa is a hyper-capitalistic country. Not all (actually none other) countries behave like this. But they all use the dollar as currency. The difference is that usa is the economic superpower but that does not make them control way the world world any longer. It disappeared when the culture war was lost. The war on drug was lost too and now there is a class war. Wonder how that will go
I can almost hear the bone spurs growing…
Poor “volunteers” will do the backbreaking manual labor. Rich volunteers will drive the heavy machinery in air conditioned cabins.
You’ll work harder
With a gun in your back
For a bowl of rice a day
Slave for soldiers
Til you starve
Then your head is skewered on a stake
Now you can go where people are one
Now you can go where they get things done
Saw Jello do a spoken word performance during the 2nd Gulf War.and he asked "Who would trust a country run by a Bush, a Dick and a Colon?
slayer song?
Good guess, and I can Imagine it’s a lyric they would use.
Dead Kennedys - Holiday in Cambodia
Thanks! ill check it out!
First time with surf punk? Try DK’s police truck, soup is good food and Agent Orange’s bloodstains or miserlou.
it is, thanks, i am learning the guiatr. is surf punk dick dale? i remember an album of his
Cases of bone spurs are skyrocketing
Repeat after me class.
FUCK
YOU
PAY
ME
As someone who farmed for the first couple of decades of my life - no. We need to utilize drones for farming and ban the use of tires and fossil fuels (which deposit heavy metals) on fields.
Also pretty sure glyphosate/Roundup caused health issues for everyone I know and myself (all farmers/in farm communities). It’s a neurotoxin and is in the entire Ogallala acquifer and most ground water around farms and their watershed. I spoke with a lead state toxicologist in the PNW about this. It verifiably has effects on fish and insects in the watershed here (which Monsanto claims is too diluted to have effects).
My father was a farmer in the 90s and wrote to Bill Clinton to ask for more regulation and study of the effects of pesticides and more protections for farmers in relation to pesticides and Bills response back was basically “No”. It did come on a really nice piece of paper though and had the “from the desk of the president” letter head and everything.
I emailed Trump and Biden both about implementing a free national online school prek-college, using adaptive learning and with no time restrictions. Kids can use this online school as a supplement to regular schooling or in lieu of. This way, parents who are concerned about school shootings or illness can still feel like their kid is getting an okay education.
Adults who have already graduated can take these classes to refresh knowledge (helping to combat misinformation online). If Christians want to teach and learn Christian theory, fine, that can be in a Christian theory area (Christian science should not be considered actual science but instead a theology).
Teachers can compete for best online class and schools and teachers could get bonuses for the most popular material. The grading should be done by either a computer or paras who are employed at the national level.
Students then can also have access to various language accomodations and disability accomodations for all their lessons. This is also why there should be no time restrictions - kids with learning disabilities might take a year to learn a half semester of algebra, or young adults with jobs might also need extra time too. The time limits we place on learning are arbitrary and only help out people with advantages already.
Last there should be no general studies requirement with the adaptive online learning. If a kid LOVES trains, let the adaptive learning teach them all about trains. Maybe that means the kid will learn about calculating the impact speed of two trains colliding, so they incidentally learn math and physics. But we shouldn’t require they learn math and physics if they don’t choose to.
Anyway, I wrote this out to them and got really lame letters back too. It’s crazy because this school idea is a legacy program that could cement a president’s name forever in education, like how Teddy Roosevelt is associated with National Parks. Yet Trump didn’t want the idea. Biden neither. Maybe Harris will like it. It’s quite elegant imo and win/win. I’ve spoken with numerous educators about it and they have no criticisms. It’s like our government doesn’t want progress
I think there’s just too much money in the status quo. I like your idea.
And just for the record, Monsanto is now part of Bayer.
Every* American Citizen
- Except my kids, obviously.
That’s the beauty of it.
Conservatives will push for laws that affect urban public schools and have their kids in private schools or live outside city limits.
I mean a national labor corps with incentivized participation isn’t the worst idea. Gives people the opportunity to get work experience without necessarily having to understand their career direction in life.
Shouldn’t be a draft in any circumstances but absolute crisis situation, like essential infrastructure is on the brink of total collapse and regular pay incentives aren’t getting bodies on it fast enough.
Who knows, might get some people into work they didn’t realize they’d gel with, plenty of inspector positions are behind work load and I’ve got s feeling a part of that is just people not knowing the work is out there.
I’d be super on board for this. Treat it similarly to the military, where room and board are provided, and they ship you to an underserved part of the country to help.
Especially if we extended the GI Bill to cover participating. Like, do 4 yrs and you get full tuition covered at any public university.
I think it would really promote national unity and help to lift people out of poverty. You’d have people from all over the country working together, bridging a lot of our internal divisions. You’d get people out of their bubbles and echo chambers and have them actually seeing the country.
If we could normalize it, where it’s just what people did after highschool, it would give people time to figure their lives out. Remove the pressure of having to choose a career right away. I know so many people who “had to go to college” because that was the next step, but didn’t have a clue what they wanted in life, so got useless majors and have dead ended. This would be perfect for people like that.
Plus infrastructure in the US is a joke. And even as the OP implies, farming is a broken business in the US for a number of reasons. There are never enough people working soup kitchens and food pantries, or cleaning up our national forests to prevent forest fires. If we could mobilize our young people en masse, we could make a huge difference in this country.
I’m 1000% on board.
Yeah that’s all fine but it’s blocked by one of two major political parties in the US doesn’t believe government should exist. At best they’d support a privatized version of the that siphoned money out and didn’t help people that need help.
We’re going to struggle to get anything done as long as conservatives are treated as if they have any merit.
No, I think that’s actually the beauty of this. The OP meme is a right wing meme. A national civil service is a right wing position.
I think there’s a way to craft this program in a hugely bipartisan way. You get all the “patriotism, one nation, farms and country” stuff the right wants, and all the “infrastructure improvements, social safety nets, free college” stuff the left wants.
I think there’s a real potential to get some solid bipartisanism here.
Isn’t it basically similar to the public work projects of the “New Deal”?
Without a draft it’s just a Keynsian jobs program like CCC or Teach for America. Not the worst idea in the world.
I heard in Finland it’s kinda like this. You have to do something like a year in the military or a year in civil service and I like it. Don’t want to do the military? Fine, do the postal service or some shit just do something. It’s like a great equalizer since rich and poor have to do it and they all have the same options.
Nah, fuck conscription, people only have a limited time in this world and you shouldn’t be forced to waste it on the military/civil service. The options should be there if you want to take them, make it appealing if you want, but no one should be forced into any service.
With Finland it’s seen as a social necessity because they’re neighbors with Russia.
Perhaps they will reconsider the ‘need’ for it with their new NATO membership. Will be hard to remove something so ingrained in their culture though.
I doubt it, but maybe. They’re still what amounts to a front line territory.
The United States has had the luxury of an all-volunteer military for slightly longer than I’ve been alive. My name went on the Selective Service roster. They keep that list. They’re having recruitment and retention problems. And the United States has a much bigger population than the likes of Finland.
We had recruiting problems because we had unrealistic medical standards. For decades people just lied about what they could. Then we decided to use a system that could actually check the records of recruits.
Once waivers were made easily available, instead of months of admin work, recruiting goals were magically met again.
I already think some kind of required (paid) community service year should be required for every citizen, so I guess part of that could be agriculture.
Required I think doesn’t cut mustard, like I said, it should be required only when all other possibilities to address a labor shortage crisis have been exhausted.
Required service is something you do when you’re in a weakened or threatened position with what you’re invoking it for, so doing it unnecessarily just doesn’t help quite as much as one might think.
There’s better ways to address a perceived national attitude problem than forced labor.
We are in a weakened, threatened position. 🤪
There’s great arguments here about how a service corps could bridge divides and give all youth a better pathway from highschool into the (often predatory) worlds of job markets and higher ed, and also great arguments about why mandatory service infringes on freedom pretty significantly.
Is there a way to structure a national year of service idea that gives people the freedom to opt out yet would still get chosen by many kids from diverse backgrounds? Like how do we get kids who have had a college fund ready to go since they were born to see the benefits of spending a year building bridges? It would be a neat cultural shift.
Probably from social isolation by everyone who did do that.
Like if the rich asshole kids wanna mark themselves out by skipping out on a national service that’s their prerogative, just the same it’s everyone else’s to make judgements about them based on that.
That “some of y’all never worked a service job and it shows” tweet hits a lot harder when there’s a federal budget for the messaging about the good of lending a working hand to your fellow countryfolks.
Nobody with a college fund from day one is going to see the service job tweet and care. They already have a rich kids club of other wealthy friends.
Why should we be subsidizing labor costs for large agribusiness?
I can think of a lot more virtuous forms of national service.
The next post explains that agriculture is so important, it should be controlled by the government, with quotas, and rations…
/s
Because then we can seize the means of production.
What’s “our farms” do we own the means of production? Do I get food or resources from this farm? Wtf
they’ll take you to the town square and the agricorps will bid on you
You can eat all the apples you like just make sure you pick 4000 per day.
As long as every farmer has to work in the city for a year.
No, the farmers design bridges and dams.
The engineers work in hospitals.
The doctors we shoot for being nerds.
Perfect society.
Edit: we also kill all the sparrows for some reason.
I’m pretty sure many of those farmers, especially the young ones would not return to the farm. Farmers are stuck in the fantasy that they don’t need the cities. They don’t need any products beyond what they need to ride in the their GPS controlled air conditioned tractor as it plows perfectly straight rows. None of which is built on the farm.
They don’t need any products beyond what they need to ride in the their GPS controlled air conditioned tractor as it plows perfectly straight rows.
That does sound really comfy
Please don’t make me work in a hospital they get mad when you take patients apart
I so want to make a farmer, who likes to complain that comfy office jobs aren’t real work, work a phone support hotline for a year.
