You’re welcome to come raise some hell outside the capital if you can afford that trip, though.

People don’t talk about it, but this is what jan 6th was. Not for a good cause, obviously, but basically everyone that was participating in that was either psychotic enough to willingly throw away their entire life based on a single ineffective and uncoordinated mass mob capital occupation on a single day, or they were small business owners who were able to afford to fly across the country first class and take several days off of work, and probably most of them were both of those things. A lot of these guys are getting arrested immediately after being pardoned because the prison system sucks and does not set you up for success, obviously, even for those wealthy people. There’s not an escape from the state, even for them, their lives will be irrevocably altered and made worse by their participation in a single ineffective day of high profile movement.

Obviously you could action a good amount of political change onto people by simply making them think they have nothing left to lose, as we see with that, but again, mass, uncoordinated movements are broadly ineffective. More organized and militant action is what you really only get when people start to collectively understand that the people around them, the things they actually do have left, are under immediate threat, and they need to do something to stop that. Maybe even more than that, you probably need a funding apparatus which is either gonna be foreign, or probably based on illegal domestic activities. So probably foreign.

I dunno at what point some of those criteria start to be filled. It’s not looking great.

Either get scabbers, or take advantage of increased automation, or a combination of the two. The only way to prevent those scabbers is with outright illegal militant action focused on targeting them, which would earn you the ire of the state, and which most people also don’t want to engage in due to moral qualms.

You can prevent a couple trucks from leaving an amazon warehouse for a couple days when you can organize a general strike where you’re paying everyone a full stipend after saving maybe years of union dues, and that’s the legal way to protest, which costs like, tens or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars in expenditure every day, and is basically a war of wealth attrition with a huge megacorporation.

You could do that, or you could get like one or two guys to slash tires, and then set those trucks back for about the same amount of time. Or slash the tires of the individual scabber’s home cars, which is maybe gonna be easier to pull off. How much of that militant action can you engage in, as an organization, though, before the feds just decide to completely crack down on you and deem you to be domestic terrorists, along the lines of what happened to the people engaged in the “stop cop city” movement? That’s a good example of what’s even a relatively low scale and low stakes operation, that’s not very militant, and they’re still getting slapped with rico charges and domestic terrorism.

A lot of those unions are politically agnostic to partisan slant because they’re trying to navigate the current political climate, where they’re basically unilaterally hated and unprotected, but also a lot of big unions exist functionally as an extension of the HR department of these companies because of how popular support for them has been drained, membership has dwindled, labor power has dwindled amongst their lower members because of increased automation, and because they’ve just straight up slowly been dismantled over time and legally gimped.

Sorry, you gotta upgrade everything every 5 years, because otherwise there’s a security vulnerability! Sorry, looks like there will be no new updates on your software, no compatibility! Surely, things have become so much more efficient in the last 5 years as a result of processing gains, and surely that will be passed onto the consumer rather than eaten up in the middle, and surely we need that increased processing power so you can run the increasingly dwindling number of social media sites that are actually relevant!

Sorry, looks like we got rid of the headphone jack because it takes up too much space and it’s too hard to make the phone water resistant! The IR blaster isn’t relevant anymore because everyone has unilaterally switched to wifi operated smart TVs! Surely! Sorry, the micro SD card slot took up too much space, we need to use that space for processing power! Same with irreplaceable batteries! Sorry, the 16:9 aspect ratio we used to have for phones isn’t available in any phone anymore, because we decided to replace the physical buttons and ugly bezels with basically unusable screen space! But we’re still gonna have a hole punched in the screen for the camera!

I dunno. Modern phones are fucking dogshit now, I hate them so much it’s unreal. Even the software is progressively getting worse year over year. Shit used to be so basically functional and it’s become so horrible.

I think what I would like is a bigass flip phone that unfolds into a tablet but instead of being thick as hell because the tablet is some OLED bullshit, I just want like, a e-reader. So I can have an easy way to read a book in my pocket.

They came prepared, organised, with meticulous plans and goals.

Their plan is still basically a non-starter, though. Deporting the 11 million undocumented immigrants that live here is logistically impossible. At least, it’s impossible if you want to have a small government, which is something that they want. Even with a larger more well organized government, it’s difficult, and offers you no legitimate return financially. You’re dissecting the two-tier labor system which you already had domestically. You could conceivably have a portion of this be a privately funded and organized sector, which would be maybe slightly more capable of doing a genocide, but it would still be hilariously inefficient and unachievable and not offer you any real wins. Rinse and repeat this fundamental set of contradictions for basically every goal that they have. They want to just straight up deny the idea of gender existing at all, and that leads to absolutely no plan in how to handle trans people’s listed passport sex. Their voter base wants low egg prices, and yet they create a regulatory environment where bird flu will become a massive epidemic.

This isn’t to say that they’re totally incompetent morons, but they are legitimately disconnected from reality in a way which is both dangerous and highly unstable and contradictory at a fundamental level. The south did not lose because of some sort of fundamental lack of moral character, they lost because a slave economy is straight up incoherent and inefficient and offers you much less efficiency in the grand scheme. The nazis dedicated a shocking amount of energy explicitly to cruelty in ways which were both intrinsic to their ideals and actively made their war efforts much less effective overall.

I still don’t have any confidence that this will not be a bumpy ride or that we will get out of it or that there won’t be like, global nuclear warfare or whatever, or that lots of people won’t die in the wake of it. I’m just making the sort of more basic point that with these people, on some level, it doesn’t matter how organized they are. They’re stupid on a much harder to solve level, than that.

Everyone’s eating it up, not only his supporters. He got a solid like, 2 to 3 day’s worth of news cycle out of an absolute nothingburger, while everyone is safely diverted away from analyzing all the other shit he’s been doing, say, through executive orders. I think he’s just throwing a massive amount of shit at the wall, seeing what sticks, seeing what he can get away with. Media will not contest him shitting on trans people, or removing DEI from all the government websites, or forcing government employees back into offices that don’t exist, among any number of other things.

It doesn’t even really matter if the things he proposes are even possible at all. The only way he’d be able to invade gaza with US troops in order to forcibly relocate the palestinians, conceivably, is by overthrowing jordon, which could be something they’ve been cooking up for a while, or pressuring egypt into doing so which would probably completely fuck over egypt’s domestic politics and flip the region into an uncontrollable civil war which would be another actor in the region that’s no longer amenable to israel, and the resulting blowback might even cause the total collapse of israel. Even with that excuse, which is ultimately what it would be, it would basically just be a full US backed genocide, both in the literal sense of having to kill basically everyone, and under the academic definition. That would probably kill any domestic US support for israel, and again, would maybe result in their collapse. Outside of that, outside of a full US backing and ground invasion, Israel can only really do what they’ve already been doing, to a mixed amount of success.

Despite the improbability, he might still go through with all of that. It’s not even really up to him in terms of sort of, just whether or not he’s dumb enough to do that, which he probably also is, but it’s mostly just whether or not everyone else in the administration is actually planning to do that. Will the concentration camp in guantanamo that libs failed to shut down before it got to this point get off the ground? Will the ICE officers actually be capable of running around and arresting everyone, or will that be utterly stupid as an idea for the same exact reasons that it’s always been utterly stupid, and for the same reasons that the foundation of the system is basically non-functional? Is this all just a bunch of bullshit until trump can justifiably pass almost uncontested another round of tax cuts to the ultra-wealthy? Who could say.

I mostly just find myself hoping that the admin goes careening off a cliff after the internal contradictions of the system begin to fully bear their weight, and something better emerges in the wake of that. It’s not really up to us, at the bottom, and it never really has been. It’s maybe up to, how hard the pharoah lets his heart become, or what have you.

unless there’s some fundamental misunderstanding about how our elections work.

Yeah, this is pretty much the core of it, I think. There were very minor attempts to gain nuance on the issue, say, there were people in the swing states that were committing to a vote towards kamala which would be contingent on an equivalent one or two protest votes for a given DSA or PSL or whatever other kind of candidate in a non-swing state, so as to be a protest vote.

I think the underlying logic kind of remains the same though. You can’t leverage votes, because democrats don’t give a shit if they lose, realistically. That’s jack shit, to them, they don’t really care one way or the other, I think. Cynical part of my brain says that trump probably didn’t even really want to run a second time, and also didn’t really want to win, and is just coasting on the momentum that he had previously which has sort of locked him into the track he’s currently on, which would at the very least comically make this election a comical contest between candidates who are almost actively trying to lose.

well, hopefully known sleeper agent JDPON don accelerates the amerikkka burgerreich into the shitter so we can move onto a less bad country, not founded on slavery and genocide. the mandate of heaven will surely pass on to the BRICS nations, everyone will move away from the petrodollar and climate change will be solved, there will be a transgender furry revolution where they take over the mechanisms of information control from the inside. and bernie sanders will finally be elected in the year 2040, also, at the age of 99.

I suspect there’s a good portion of liberal voters who are above a certain level of wealth, and know they aren’t really affected by politics in more than superficial ways, and just sort of hate republicans for acting stupid, or, unfashionable, and see muslim voters as being unfashionable, because they failed to “fall in line”, as they explicitly state in their oft-repeated adage. Beyond that and maybe more understandably, probably a good proportion of them are people who don’t really know what they’re talking about, and are sort of, vaguely frustrated or terrified about the shit they keep seeing on CNN, or hearing about on their daily drive to work on NPR, unable to really tear themselves away from the political slop mill, where trump is kind of, notoriously good at just shoving a million things down the pipe.

I think a lot of these types can sort of be discounted out of hand, because the pipe is pushing such an overwhelming glut of content down their throats that they’ll probably never be convinced by anything you say almost ever. For every paragraph you punch out, you’re maybe gonna be counteracting like, a couple minute’s worth of propaganda, and you’re having to counteract like, eight hour’s worth of propaganda that they’re consuming on a daily basis.

I think mostly social media more broadly is engineered explicitly to facilitate this kind of like, using other people as punching bags, and venting explicitly at them, behavior. Even lemmy, which is just, designed exactly the same as reddit, but with a more open-source slant. This behavior where people use each other for rhetorical arguments rather than seeking to discuss things in good faith. More than that it’s sort of engineered to accompany the former propaganda apparatus. It’s the new media, same as the old media.

Yeah. I thought this sort of shit would’ve been cut down after those CIA layoffs trump did or whatever, or, that’s what everyone’s been jokingly saying, at least. Probably it’s more along the lines that social media companies keep selectively propagating this shit because they’re a revolving door with those three letter agencies anyways. Saw a LOT of black liberals posting with starbucks cups and mcdonald’s after the election, and talking about how they want to buy beachfront property in gaza, because the michigan vote didn’t come through for Kamala. Most of those people probably weren’t conforming to the boycott in the first place, and more broadly didn’t give a shit at all, but still, incredibly harrowing stuff, there.

Anyways yeah I agree with the other guy, if you wanted to spurn discussion, you probably would’ve been better off posting some shit that’s not like, immediately just blaming the protest votes? Is in better faith more generally? Probably wouldn’t gain as much traction exclusively because of that, as is the case with the site, but you’d at least not be contributing to that sort of bad faith discussion as much, which I think the initial post is doing.

You know I think maybe this resolves me that more people should just, run for political office, or maybe, resolves me that the dirtbag left is a concept which could probably be measured with some sort of success. You’re probably right, the left needs to learn that people would probably vote for any stupid piece of shit with no sense of decorum, as long as that guy gave them healthcare. No sense of decorum actually might be an advantage, even, because then there’s nothing left to rhetorically attack you with. That’s sort of the whole, like, john fetterman-phenomena. Too bad he turned into an actual piece of shit instead of just being a guy that dresses in a hoodie.

I was up and down many threads immediately before the election straining with every fiber of my being to explain to people the variety of ways in which their democracy is actually a sham and isn’t effective or reflective of popular will or sentiment.

The most I got in return was that, nah, none of that applies, because I just don’t really feel like it. It’s infuriating.

Every 4 years the machine churns, every 4 years people forget everything that happened the last time, forget every detail of the system, and just decide to kind of, sloganeer constantly rather than discuss critically, because that brings them some sense of control over the way things are going. It can be prefigured into their personal narrative of events, and how much they, personally, put on the line, how much they tried to change people’s minds. A participation trophy for their rubber stamp, for their ticking of a certain box, while the real rulers are off in washington making the real decisions. Ultimately it’s kind of fruitless, I think, or should only be viewed along the same lines as being personal slop-entertainment, or “self-improvement”. Anyone who’s not honest with at least that much can’t really be trusted to speak on these things, I think.

It’s not even really that, it’s just that home loans of like 10,000 to people who have made rent for the past 2 years and have a salary of over 80,000 but not over 200,000 and own a small business and own at least 2 cats but not over 3 cats and have a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry, isn’t very enticing or hopeful policy. Neither is campaigning with liz cheney when like 200,000 people are being killed with US bombs.

nope, I’m totally morally vacuous and hypocritical, for sure that’s the case. definitely, I look at the nazis organizing into an ethostate much like israel, killing like 20 million people, and think. yeah, that wasn’t what was wrong there, and my sympathies shouldn’t be extended out to the gazans. I just find their aesthetics offensive, that’s the real problem. I definitely haven’t seen people collecting pieces of their children in plastic grocery bags and talk about how they would rather be dead online and talk about how they can smell the rotting bodies trapped under the rubble 24/7.

do the gesture and post it on here if it’s not a nazi gesture

Because for the majority of the world, the average American is a selfish bourgeois with a big house and two cars, who thinks oppression is when the gas price rise.

I mean I fucking live here and that’s pretty much my assessment as well to be honest. Maybe not your average american if we’re working on like, who’s right just based on home ownership statistics, but certainly, that’s not really an invalid perception.

I think it’s kind of stupid that we’re defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default “well, that’s too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!” metric we’re using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that’s not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.

About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don’t control it, there’s probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.

No, my criticism isn’t so much that billionaires aren’t necessarily evil, because I think it’s mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn’t really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We’ve put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where’s the cutoff, here? I’m sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.

My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what’s actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that’s the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a “not necessarily a billionaire” healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.

that’s always been the case, even when they had that shit printed on the can. it’s a matter of the individual retailers doing that. I think there was some system to report them to the company but obviously the arizona tea company doesn’t really have any control over the prices that retailers decide to sell their shit for. which is partially why I think the whole thing that they’re only supposed to cost a dollar everywhere is kind of lowkey just a marketing ploy.

kind of racist

kind of?