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Kirios posted:These compromises are acceptable and there's still a ton of good that will happen with the 3.5 trillion. Let's get BBB signed off on! What is left to do now? Is the senate coming up for a vote?
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Nov 2, 2021 20:35
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So what about the VA house? Is that going GOP Too?
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Nov 3, 2021 01:42
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So I've noticed a lot of people here have been saying "Well what if America is actually a conservative country and running on leftist policies won't win you elections even if you tried". I understand this sentiment and it's probably true. A lot of Americans probably are conservative. They like their cars, they like the luxuries and "freedoms" of modern 20th century America and many people already have things like rising home equity or a decent enough life they don't want to compromise on. They don't want to be told that they're bad people or that you're going to take away something they already have and replacing it with something "risky" complicated and difficult to understand. However I don't think that this is the time to lose faith in the system. It just means you're gonna have to pick and choose what you campaign on and focus narrowly on it while figuring out the pain points of common voters and running elections on the promise of addressing these problems. This is not a new concept. The fact of the matter is we're a bunch of misfits of predominantly urban and white collar background. In Tsarist Russia there were all kinds of proto-communist movements that fixated on replacing the Tsarist regime by any means necessary, including violence only to find they faced severe repercussions and a discrediting of their movement. Everyone thought "If we could just go to the people and plead our case they'd be sympathetic and activate as a revolutionary cause" Then we had something called "Going to the people" as summed up in this wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Going_to_the_People quote:It was ultimately a failure, and by the Autumn of that year more than a thousand arrests were made. They failed to inspire "unrest even on a local scale" or to establish local footholds for future activities. Yet almost 40 years later we had a revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. TulliusCicero posted:Here's the deal: we might be in one of the most pro-labour political environments of our lifetime. Strikes everywhere, millions quitting their lovely jobs in solidarity, the Great Resignation is upon us. This is an absolute goldmine opportunity to get true Leftist grassroots movements going everywhere in this country. This guy gets it. We're never going to get anywhere by imposing leftism on America, the people hate that and will vote Republican to spite you just as Russian peasants turned in would be anarchists and revolutionaries to the police for political crimes during "Going to the people". Many of us are middle class computer touchers and educated urban "elites" in the eyes of the masses we all think we represent. There is a massive pro labor movement that is taking place in spite of us rather than because of us. You want an alternative to current Democratic Party/GOP orthodoxy? It starts by you going out and figuring out what the pain points are of every day people. We already know most of them, healthcare, low pay, abusive management, lovely inflexible working conditions. It's nothing new. One of the biggest pain points for working class people in Imperial Russia was that their pay was garbage and often even worse than what was officially stated because management would dock their pay with fines for stupid procedural errors. Lenin was a lawyer and he wrote simple, easy to read leaflets that condensed this grievance into an understanding of what the worker's rights were and how they could work with socialists to agitate for and demand better rights. In some cases these rules violated existing labor laws. This was a time when peasants were deeply religious people with conservative values and a secret police often infiltrated every aspect of society and arrested people for political thought crime... If the Russians could change their country in this scenario, there's no reason Americans can't do so in the comparably freer and more permissive American system. But you aren't gonna do it by declaring yourself a socialist mayoral candidate and then running scab labor in your election operation. You aren't gonna do it by telling people they can't have things that make their lives easier in a capitalist hellscape. You sure as hell aren't gonna do it by demonizing people's way of life. You also are not going to sit on the peak and preach about leftist politics and hope that if people just understood where you're coming from they'd vote you.. None of that is going to work. I've said it once and I'll say it again. You have no responsibility or obligation to get into the weeds to explain HOW you are going to make things better for people. That's a white collar upper-middle class academia sort of audience and it lets your political enemies nitpick sound bytes out of your long winded academic explanations and come up with reasons to oppose you... No it's much simpler. You bring out good old fashioned agitprop. You're not getting paid enough- We'll fix it by making them pay you more You can't afford your medical bills? We'll make healthcare free. We'll use new technology to create jobs in the energy sector (Read: Green Energy) We'll create new jobs and opportunities in X industries. It really doesn't matter what you do to make this a reality, as long as you do it effectively and deliver on the promise to shore up your support with those constituencies. The best part is we have modern technology and data science techniques that with some money would allow you to build a database of voters and cross reference data of the biggest pain points and political grievances people have right now. Then you just agitate and focus on those core issues. Boris Johnson won the British Election by repeating "Get Brexit Done" almost constantly and I think that works a lot better than a complex explanation of why we're gonna do yet another referendum on Brexit to see if you really want it after everyone was sick and tired of hearing about it for 2-3 years. No more talking about getting rid of coal and fossil fuels. You do that discretely with your political comrades at party HQ when you write up your policy and bills. You don't talk about taking away people's cars. You focus on simple statements that address people's problems. Most importantly you go out and you LISTEN. You don't impose your beliefs. You go around to red states and you ask what it is that makes people feel lovely about their lives or their jobs. You don't ask as a carpetbagger or some Yankee either. You find someone the community trusts who's also willing to talk to you and you get them to ask those questions. Then you take the bulk of those grievances compatible with socialism or social democracy and you condense them to simple, easy to read points of view that fit on a leaflet or a soundbyte you can repeat on TV. These are things conservatives and the GOP innately understand while Democrats go all half cocked on TV like a Rhodes scholar and talk down on people with complicated "Scary" plans they later pare down for obscure procedural reasons nobody understands. That kind of poo poo pisses people off and it doesn't surprise me in the least that people vote Republican because of it. Republicans know how to tap into deep emotional fears and concepts that people can easily understand unless they're a well educated urban political junkies who can spend hours of their free time pouring over the information. Most people don't care. We're in an information saturated world where ideas fight for oxygen with extreme attention grabbing statements. The winning political formula in my opinion will be when the left stops being so academic and starts doing research on popular bi-partisan policy planks and then finding out how to "go viral" with simple statements and catch phrases that drive turnout on those policy planks. The Russian Revolution seized opportunities provided by the times to enact political change in an analog era. We have unique times in the digital era that are offering us a similar opportunity.
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Nov 3, 2021 14:44
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Pook Good Mook posted:Obama (and even Biden kinda) showed that you can win an election by trying to get votes in places you won't "win." The Democratic Party recruits their membership and key positions of power from Ivy League institutions and highly academic/upper class backgrounds... That has been the culture and hiring practice for the last 30-40 years at least. It's a party for those people and if you want access you have to have come from that background. It's inherently classist and a part of the problem. These kinds of people are implicitly hostile to the poor and working class. At best they'll take a sort of condescending paternalistic attitude toward them that was epitomized by post 2008 Obama. It's an obsessively credentialist party and you'll get nothing done this way because everyone in America hates these people. It's not about their education, it's their out of touch New England privilege where they're completely insulated from what the vast majority of America's problems and needs are. This is a fact and it manifests in different ways within the party and outside the party. There are some real problems out there and the issue is that we no longer have people that can "connect" with those problems in a valid way. I want to say that a fully independent 3rd party is possibly what we need here, but the party should be composed of membership of influential community members of local communities across America who are looked up to more by said communities than local politicians. I believe that we're all out of touch with the electorate, even the left. Nothing is going to change from the top down. We might as well be talking to a trust fund kid from Orange County and asking them what they think is the political solution to the problems of the lower classes in America. They might have a good sounding answer if they're truly sympathetic but they're still completely out of touch with the vast majority of the country and can never truly do anything besides serve as a facilitator for the people who actually know what is happening on the ground.
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Nov 3, 2021 15:18
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mango sentinel posted:Youngkin didn't run on being a frothing Q Anon weirdo he ran on doubling tax deductions, charter schools, lowering gas prices, and promising people can go to Chili's uninterrupted. People like those. Most voters see both parties as having fringe elements not representative of the core. A lot of states, especially swing states, are not going to be swayed by trying to paint the Republicans as a bloc of violent insurrectionists. Exactly... People are sick and tired of excuses and will vote for the simplest and most concrete message of "You have a problem? I'm gonna make it better". It just so happens people want to go about their lives unmolested with a cheaper cost of living. Everyone wants that.
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Nov 3, 2021 15:36
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It's going to be DeSantis, not Trump for 2024.
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Nov 3, 2021 16:15
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I wonder how many *voters* have issues with health insurance or medical bills... or alternatively avoid the healthcare system entirely due to cost/bureaucracy... Would be nice to see how many people in America would support M4A just from those pain points alone. Like if we had hard data about who these people are, where they live and who they currently vote for, and if they'd change their votes to someone who offers an alternative. As for M4A in future I think we should just tell people we want M4A, full stop. No getting into the weeds about how its gonna be paid for (We'll pay for it the same we pay for your police and military, we have the money and we won't raise your* taxes). *Your means anyone making 0-500k. You don't need to explain how you're gonna pay for it, you just say you're gonna do it. If you lose Democratic primaries then launch a third party and campaign exclusively on these issues as the third party. Strip out the bullshit and keep the message as dead simple as possible. If it spoils elections, who cares you're talking about making changes that people want. You need to be absolutely shameless, as the Republicans are.
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Nov 3, 2021 18:33
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Lib and let die posted:This has been said after every election cycle I've paid attention to, and while the intent is absolutely there at the start, it becomes complicated when noise gets introduced into the playbook. Let's say that the walking, talking avatar of this mindset, Healthcare Reformerman gets an interview on CNN on, I don't know, who's on the tube these days besides Maddow and Carlson? Is Ellison still there or that Cillizza idiot? Take your pick, whichever millionaire rear end in a top hat manufacturing consent for the billionaire network owner of your flavor, and Mr. Reformerman just say "No, I'm not going to answer that. You pay for war and you pay for police so don't give me that nonsense about 'how are we going to pay for it?'" I'd guarantee you that in less time than it takes the news cycle to, well, cycle, that the narrative that "Progressive Dems/3rd Party Candidate Healthcare Reformerman Can't Even Explain How to Pay for Complete Overhaul of US Healthcare System" would solidly take hold - and that's just among liberal outfits like CNN or MSNBC. I could only imagine the very start of "LIBERAL COMMUNISTS WANT TO PILFER POLICE POCKETS TO PROVIDE SEXUAL REASSIGNMENT SURGERY FOR ILLEGAL ALIENS!" on FOX and poo poo. You don't say "No I'm not gonna answer that". You're being too nice. You say "Right now when you go to the hospital you could face a 100,000 bill for a health issue that isn't your fault. I'm going to sort it out for you, we have very smart people on our team who know we can pay for it without raising your taxes" And you keep repeating the talking point... You don't say you're not gonna answer or that you don't know. You stick to the message. It's intellectually dishonest. It won't fly in Debate club. But guess what? Your audience doesn't give a poo poo. Just keep promising free poo poo without telling anyone what it costs and people will show up and vote for it. You're not here to score intellectual points or get a good grade in your university level political science class... Disabuse yourself of this notion. You're here to be a demagogue who is using policy planks to stir up deep emotional desires in the general population who is far easier to manipulate and far more numerous than a few academics in New England and Delaware. They don't care about how the sausage is made. They just want to know what they need to do to get something they want. And you are the one, the only one who can give it to them. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Nov 3, 2021 |
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Nov 3, 2021 18:49
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Ershalim posted:Is that what they're for, though? Your idea would probably work up to the point where they won and then were expected to actually do any of the things they said they'd be doing, but they don't actually want to do them. If you go so far as saying that you want to cut the profit margins of the people who run everything, you don't get elected. Even if people like you, apparently, as I think we can glean from Bernie Sanders still being one of the most-liked politicians in the country while still being entirely unelectable on national stage for Reasons. And it's been that way as far back as I've read -- the actual socialists who want to break the systems that bind people are either discredited in blatantly financially motivated character assassinations (like with Corbyn and anti-semitism) or just like, atually assassinated. You need to resonate with people to the point where being assassinated or arrested makes you even more popular... History is full of unremarkable politicians who've done worse things than promise to help people who upon being assassinated or somehow thrown out of office in an illegal way get shitloads of public support and even a revolution in their names despite they themselves not supporting such things. There's a shitload of politically toxic poo poo tied to socialism that makes you unelectable in America. These are semantics. If you get dragged into the quagmire of debating what is socialism and what isn't you're just gonna lose. The main point is figure out what sticks and you focus on doing it. If you have opponents that are trying to stop you, you point them out and tell people this is why you can't have it and if you help me deal with him and put someone more co-operative in their place, then you can have the thing you want. What I've realized is it's not about the intellectual content of your words but rather your tribal identity and the story you can tell people that makes emotional sense in their hearts. We are a paranoid society loaded with conspiracy theorists because the true explanation is mundane and it's difficult to identify villains and heroes in what is a morally bankrupt system with no recourse for anything. You need to understand the people as a good entertainer understands his audience. You need to stir up their emotions, make them angry or otherwise heavily motivated to right a wrong. Donald Trump did this. He connected with his audiences emotionally and played these emotions to get what he wants. He's quite good at it. In the left wing world we are all honest academics who believe in truth, integrity and intellectual rigor. It isn't always true but in the vast majority of cases progressives and liberals come from educated bourgeoise classes, lower nobility and embarrassed wealthy classes who don't quite fit into high society and seek to destroy them so they can be on top. Every political upheaval was a result of a groundswell of discontent and emotion driven by apolitical world events like famines, weather, disease and supply chain shortages just like this one. The intellectuals/middle classes/liberals would just capture that energy and ride it on a political surfboard to power. Often when they get this power they then betray many of the people that put them there and as long as they have the right political alliances they can hold their power. It's a story as old as America itself and it constantly retells itself in different ways. So back to your first sentence. You conduct secret meetings with like minded individuals where you agree upon a particular set of policy goals. You recruit trustworthy people while always understanding your organization will be infiltrated by spies and that's just a cost of doing business so make sure you're good at trusting the right people. From there you work on propelling many of these people to political office with the understanding that the goal is implementing particular policy goals... However, in public you're just playing people's heart strings and not committing to anything that might upset the wealthy. You construct narratives where you are the hero and certain people who oppose your policies (Which you confirm the vast majority of the people want) are villains who are trying to stop it. Thread that needle and you'll either become a martyr or you'll pull it off... It isn't easy but it's a start. You have to agitate and rile people up and keep these ideas fresh in their minds until they're an inescapable cultural phenomenon. The Soviet Union was incredibly successful in making a lot of Marxist ideas mainstream. It forced die hard conservative governments to make concessions in other countries because if they did not, these marxist movements would've overthrown them too. Everyone thinks the New Deal came from the goodness of people's hearts. It did not. It was a pragmatic gesture to prevent revolution and communism from seizing the American system. The rich are just complacent now because there's no counter ideology or mass movement that threatens them. Nobody.. not even a wealth oligarchy with all of the military muscle in the world can rule without implied consent from its people. Somehow, somewhere, someone gets sloppy. Someone gets too permissive or loose and it creates an opportunity to break through and change things politically. Either via concessions, elections or revolution.
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Nov 3, 2021 19:19
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Harold Fjord posted:We don't technically know that he can cancel the debt, just that he's hiding a memo we would expect him to trumpet if it said literally anything else, but we know he doesn't have to make us start paying it and he's doing it anyway. He could just be waiting until the next election to sign that EO so he gets more votes.
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Nov 3, 2021 20:23
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VitalSigns posted:Whoever made the post about how we've brought back a modern version of the divine right of kings really hit the nail on the head. In terms of the senate that sounds about right but the reality is these bureaucrats are a smoke screen to distract you. The real modern version of the divine right of kings is the economic system where large amounts of self-replicating wealth decide the level of power, respect and prestige you carry in society... Not how smart you are, not how moral or good of a person you are... just wealth. The more money you have, the more infallible you are. We're a society ruled by greedy dragons that hoard all the treasure and occasionally raid our cities and villages while indiscriminately killing people with their economic activities. The justification for them to treat the world as their personal playground, is the capitalist system as it currently exists and the de-facto divine right of kings. A minority of us nerds question it and wonder about its morality, but the vast majority of people have accepted it as an unchangeable fact of life. Just as in the past people have never dared question their Kings, their father protector.
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Nov 4, 2021 16:36
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Sarcastr0 posted:Economic inequality is hardly the only metric of social improvement. I'd also like to point out that living standards weren't exactly high for most Warsaw Pact/Soviet countries which did a lot to discredit anything vaguely sounding like "Socialist" in America, especially since those places were conditioned into the boomer generation as ideological enemies. Like if you lived in a hard socialist country you had many of the bare essentials taken care of but that was it. You had a lovely tiny rear end apartment, the electrics didn't work right, your consumer goods were mostly of poor quality and a lot of stuff was rationed out. These are inherent weaknesses in the central planning system where people begin to gently caress with the numbers for political gain. So you were alive, you could probably get ok/decent healthcare and you could probably get an education that was means tested based on your political connections and personal ability. Now I'm not saying the US was any better. You could just as easily say that today's supply shortages have a lot to do with corporate politics and shareholder related goals rather than operational goals and have an identical argument here. But still there's generally a lot more higher quality goods with better supply to the needs of the market in a capitalist system. So I think it's safe to say all but the most ardent takies and marxists just want a European style social democracy/mixed economy where we rein in the worst excesses of capitalism and still allow it to excel at its core function of being able to respond to the needs of the market better than a centrally planned government. Where government can help is where the private sector doesn't have a profit motive to deal with situations essential to human life/prosperity/safety. Like keeping strategic stockpiles of medical supplies that would be treated as "working capital" in a private business and thus a bad thing. Europe did a great job building a proper mixed economy system but even that had its flaws. A lot of European countries will throw up roadblocks to keep you from getting an education that you can solve with money in America. You had to be an EXTREMELY good student to go to University in many European states because you get a free ride if you get in. Basically while there's many exceptions if you can't qualify for a Pell Grant in the US, you're not going to University in Europe. You're going to be sent to a vocational school where you might end up learning a trade for which there's no jobs for anymore. Say you were a lovely student but you turned your life around, you have way more recourse in the states than you do in Europe. In Europe they'll see you were a lovely student, write you off into a more vocational stream and then you will be forced to accept work in a tire factory or risk getting your benefits cut. If you have even modest means in the US you can go to University as a so-so student and get what you need to be qualified for jobs. I hate this system and I think vocational training should be taken more seriously for the non-academically inclined but to my knowledge only places like Switzerland will let you apprentice as a decently compensated bank employee without a University degree and make a career out of it. This is by no means an attempt to try and discredit social democratic societies. Just that there's often a shortage of opportunity that for a time America remedied before all the essentials like healthcare, education, healthy food and housing became prohibitively expensive. I'm pretty sure nobody would care if private health insurance was like 250 per month in exchange for a simple health card you could use anywhere you wanted without any questions or restrictions... Likewise I'm pretty sure if tuitions were like 2000 per year for a 4 year program nobody would be complaining either. It's just all the costs skyrocketed out of control because people realized demand for these things was inelastic so we gotta go for broke and try to get these things funded so they're free or near free. EDIT: I want to add that America has a severe problem with survivorship bias because we often parade successful people like Jeff Bezos or the recent spat of Millennial/Gen Z crypto millionaires as an example of how if you're clever and smart you'll find a way to get rich. The reality is that for every 1 of those people there's countless more who failed and couldn't get back up and try again due to an absence of generational wealth. In higher tax, higher regulation jurisdictions you can't do these things. There's more regulatory barriers that keep you from coming up with ways to become affluent so you're stuck milling about in the middle or lower income brackets and are just as unhappy as any lower class American with the exception that the social safety net will keep you barely breathing. But dealing with welfare services in Europe can be a very stressful and awful process. It's not exactly smiles and sunshine to say the least. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Nov 4, 2021 |
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Nov 4, 2021 19:00
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If I was sitting in Congress I’d have a really hard time voting down these bills because it would feel like I’m just doing that republican thing where I’m preventing anything from ever happening. What exactly does the progressive caucus have to gain when the Manchins of the world don’t want a single thing to change from the moment Trump stopped being president? Nothing you do is going to change them. You just have to primary the radical centrists and moderates where you can. The issue with that is America is inherently conservative and they seem to double down on that the more their ideology gets proven false.
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Nov 6, 2021 16:34
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The Angry Bum posted:If it takes longer than one sentence for Democrats to explain it, then they’ve already lost the argument regardless to the truth of it. Bumper sticker politics works quite effectively. It’s a tried and true tactic of forcing your opponent to explain or defend something that isn’t truth but it’s being screamed at loud enough that people are convinced it is. And when the democrat has to explain it? ‘He’s lying! You can’t convince me otherwise!’ And proceeds to vote GOP. This is the point I’ve tried to make repeatedly. The Democratic Party is poorly suited to attract votes from anyone except a subset of the liberal urban middle and upper classes. They take on a highly academic Ivy League mentality that rubs a lot of rural and urban working class people the wrong way. Their message does not resonate with normal people. An actual working class person who’s representative of what America actually looks like outside coastal cities is almost nonexistent among party candidates. The closest you might see that is a guy like Fetterman or someone working at the local level. The Dems purged all their new deal era working class reps with (at the time) younger and more small L liberal college kids in the 1970s and 1980s. It comes as no surprise they betrayed the working class shortly after and began pushing a neoliberal economic message. They are woefully under-equipped and incapable of dealing with the sort of concise, emotional and inflammatory retail politics the republicans can carry out with impunity. I mean you might as well be a nerd trying to talk to a bunch of jocks and convince them to vote for you as a student council rep. I look at how radical politics and liberal politics works in America today and what I see is a lot of people who don’t know how to talk to or even connect with the people they’re trying to represent. We’re like a bunch of rabbits trying to teach the water buffalo how to coordinate a combat strategy against some lions. The democrats or at least socialist groups like the DSA need to get out of the academic ivory tower and start recruiting people from working class and rural backgrounds that actually connect with their local communities. It’s not good enough to just bring some 25 year old college Marxist into the fold and expect them to deliver magic political victories. People have been trying that kind of poo poo since the 1800s and they failed just as miserably back then. Major political change in America is going to come from unexpected places and often so quickly even the political gurus of this thread won’t see it coming and will find out too late to actually try and control whatever movement spontaneously rises up. I think it’s already happening. The great reshuffle/great resignation is basically a rolling general strike in all but name. Just because people aren’t picketing or out there demanding political change doesn’t mean that people are either stupid or blind to the exploitation of microwave reheated robber -baron capitalism. But these same people are much more concerned with the minutiae of their day to day lives and have taken personal responsibility to change it so they can be happier. It didn’t come from an ideology or political orthodoxy. It’s just pragmatic self interest. I don’t care if you’re socialist or a die hard conservative nothing trumps pragmatic self interest. People in this thread are splitting hairs over bills that clearly still help people that many others in the thread are completely out and of touch with. Again I strongly believe that the political change the country needs is going to come from places none of us expected or knew about. Every movement for political change often happens organically and spontaneously while independent of currently established organized politics. The big question is how much existing politics can co-opt or seize control of said movements once they get started. The marxists for example were totally unprepared for the events of Bloody Sunday in 1905 and yet here was an entire movement of working class people demanding better pay and treatment at their workplaces. This wasn’t some socialist Revolution. It was literally just people wanting their self interest taken care of. The message didn’t go much further than that though they were certainly willing to accept other political changes if their own needs were met. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 14:50 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 14:33
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On Terra Firma posted:When the post election coverage started rolling in from VA where reporters kept quoting people saying "Why would we vote for a dem when they don't even bother to come out here and talk to us?" I came to the same conclusion. Even if it's just a local candidate that's going to fail no matter what you have to have someone out there trying to connect with people on the local level in rural areas of the state. I think that's part of why Northram won. There was absolutely an anti-Trump wave that rolled through but I think he won by a larger amount than any other Dem in recent memory. Terry won in the previous election by a slim margin and lost the last one by two points. Northram won by 9. I think he grew up in southwest VA and while he didn't sweep every county in the state you didn't have the same visceral backlash you had in this past election. It doesn't matter how many urban libs you court if someone like Youngkin can run up the score in small pockets of flyover country. Northram and his southern drawl might have been enough to keep people home because he wasn't offensive enough to their conservative sensibilities to drive turnout. 100% this. You're not gonna get votes for your party if you're running a rotating tap of forgettable pro-politicians who nobody in the region knows or trusts. The brain trust in the Democratic party comes from New England socially liberal, economically conservative think tanks and business leaders who have absolutely completely out of touch with the communities they run in. A student activist who got gassed in the occupy wall street protests will have better luck running in a working class New York district than they would running in Kentucky or Georgia (outside maybe the districts where the major college is). If the Democrats want to win they need to run people who were leaders in their local stevedore union, people who the local community trusts and understands. There are thousands of untapped political and revolutionary leaders in America who are completely unaware of their potential as a political force and are simply well-liked influential members of their local communities who can resonate across their state and truly speak to their state's people and problems. They're the sorts of people who occasionally hear "you should get into politics" and the answer is always "nah". If the national party was open to actually being representative of the regions they want to represent they'd be able to provide the institutional support to these people. But they're not interested. The Democratic party is a microcosm of business leaders, wealthy coastal liberals and suburban/middle class people who want to "do the right thing" but have never met, seen or even driven through the kinds of neighborhoods or places they want to represent. I would even go as far as saying if they met a "real" American who occupies 90% of the landmass these people never visit they would be a combination of offended, shocked or otherwise contemptuous of them. Think about the way Mark Zuckerberg appears when he launches a media op to try and come off as relatable, friendly or approachable... Everyone in this thread can agree he hits the uncanny valley in such an extreme way that he's become the subject of gifs and memes for the last decade. This is how the Democrats appear to all but their most traditional working class holdouts. A Democrat is the trust fund hipster who wears flannel, has expensive tattoos and drinks $8/pint craft beer and Pabst Blue Ribbon in "dive bars" built within the repurposed, gentrified, decaying corpse of America's industrial heartlands. They're not real, the people who they are turning into a profit oriented fashion trend see that and feel deeply uncomfortable with it. Frankly it's offensive. There's career union guys who've fallen into destitution and decay while their former workplaces and communities turn into high priced playgrounds for suburban college educated rich kids cosplaying as you like your life and culture is some kind of never ending ironic joke costume party. Is it any wonder the culture war the GOP has been raging has been so effective under contexts like this? I would be so loving angry that the party I thought represented me has turned over to catering to people like that while leaving me out in the cold. I'd vote for anyone who would do everything in their power to clown on people like this and spite them as hard as possible... That is just ONE of hundreds of little vignettes throughout places like PA, WI, MI that gave Trump his presidency in 2018. Arguing policy and trying to "think" your way into a social-democratic tradition can't happen if you aren't even including the people you're trying to represent or taking them seriously! EDIT: The Democrats were handed an opportunity in 2008 to make the necessary changes that would have nipped a guy like Trump in the bud. Obama was supposed to be the next FDR, not Biden. They had the supermajorities in congress to make the necessary changes that would have locked in much of the rust belt to the Democrats forever... But rather than take advantage of such a historic opportunity, the fed wrote a blank check to the richest people in America and basically shut out anyone else who they had a responsibility to help. The GOP as it exists today has expanded its tent to include a generation of what could have been reliable Democratic party voters. I bet a lot of people became independents, switched to the GOP or just gave up and stopped voting because of how badly the Obama admin hoodwinked them. This is never going to stop until we launch a mass mobilization of people who are truly representative of America and their local communities... It may be that the Democrats have numerical advantage in raw voters, but with the way the system works you need to appeal to specific regional concerns in purple states, red states and other places most of us have written off as "CHUD LAND". Frankly the entire thing is just further proof this country will never get it's poo poo together because for all our talk about how hostile and exclusionary America is, the people who call themselves liberals do a fine enough job of perpetuating shame and a particular intersectional cultural identity that only resonates with a tiny portion of the totality of America. Our side is just as bad when it comes to appealing to people who are different than we are as any other political faction we paint with a broad brush. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 16:07 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 15:46
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Majorian posted:Well yeah, that's kind of the name of the game - economic confidence is deep underwater nationally. It doesn't matter how much "Number Go Up" for the Dow; if people are afraid that it's all going to bottom out for them sooner rather than later, they're not going to reward the government in power: Yet progressive “excessively left” policy was immediately blamed for the loss.
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Nov 8, 2021 17:37
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Abner Assington posted:The Democratic Party at large does not in any way cater to "trust fund hipster[s]," dude. It doesn't cater to anyone, because they aren't changing anything in any significant way but a lot of the stuff I described in that post is perceived as a political problem thanks to the way the GOP have captured the frustration of these people and converted it to politics of spite and hate.
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Nov 8, 2021 19:36
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-Blackadder- posted:Is the current inflation issue still just coming from the supply chain log jam? This is a global problem. I work in a role that has me managing basic raw chemical materials that go into everything from household cleaners, paints, plastics, packaging to pharma applications and in the last year due to supply shortages I have sold over 1500 Metric tons less material than 2022 but I made 3.5 million dollars more than last year in margin. So I'm selling less product for exponentially more money per unit to a gigantic payout for my company of which I will see maybe $5000 in bonuses for despite being stressed out and overworked trying to keep up with this demand. You want to know where the inflation is, it starts there. Then for every less unit of product my customers get, which they pay incrementally more for, they then increase their own unit costs and it cascades exponentially until it reaches your shopping cart. This has nothing to do with printing money and government policy and everything to do with COVID shocking the JIT business model and overloading the logistics system. People are stressed and overworked. They're less willing to put up with bullshit so they're quitting their jobs or refusing to do them which in turn further makes the situation worse. Yet no one wants to pay more due to even greater fears of inflation. For my industry I'm still dealing with the consequences of the freezing weather in Houston back in Feb 2021 which we're still reeling from. Everyone is back online now but there's so many back orders and pent up demand that chemical factories are working full time and unable to meet demand. Then there was hurricane Ida which made things lovely again. Pandemic demand for Chinese goods has caused Amazon, Wal-Mart and other major companies to monopolize global freight logistics which also has ripple effects. Meanwhile the semiconductor market is locked down by big players like Apple who pre-purchased production capacity from TSMC years in advance. You've got some big players who've secured all their demand while the rest of us are in what amounts to a permanent ongoing auction for cargo space and limited products. The government isn't fixing this unless they launch a giant public works program where they start building nationally owned chemical plants, port expansion projects and wage subsidy programs for truckers and others. They have to step in and make investments that the private sector is too cowardly to invest in despite sitting on gigantic piles of cash that theyd rather invest in the stock market and shareholders than in their plants and employees. Like seriously most major private sector companies are very flush with cash. They just aren't spending any of it and choosing to wait all this out hoping that we private citizens will run out of money first and go back to begging for our jobs. Even a public works program like this won't solve things because as those workers jump in for huge salaries to help rebuild the economy and expand logistics, you still have a short-run supply problem and those extra dollars will start chasing increasingly scarcer goods. I can imagine your average construction worker landing an 80k/yr job helping expand the port of los angeles would immediately turn around and buy a fully loaded car brand new for 72 months financing and then prices start skyrocketing again. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 17:44 on Nov 10, 2021 |
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Nov 10, 2021 17:37
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Just a friendly reminder to everyone that things are looking extremely bad for Biden in the midterms and 2024 due the false narrative that he’s responsible for inflation. All GOP operatives are aggressively pushing a narrative that “reckless socialist governance” is driving up prices and leading to empty shelves. Nobody is gonna listen to me but: 1. I work in a company where our aggressive drive for growth has had me directly raising my margins from 7% to up to 35 percent in less than one year. 2. Many of the most visible aspects of American life: Personal care products Beverages Snacks Food etc Are all controlled by gigantic conglomerates in duopoly or cartels who can raise and maintain prices for no other reason than because they say so. Ignore me at your own peril but the lack of enforcement of anti-trust laws isn’t just a Biden problem. It’s an America problem that they GOP are happily capitalizing on as a crisis caused by socialist policy. This is how they’re gonna crush the left for another generation and they’re sitting here and letting them do it. This happened to Jimmy Carter and it’s happening again and nothings being done to seize the narrative. Literally the entire American goods and services economy is all controlled by multinational corporations who no longer have to engage in any competition. They've been aggressively buying out their competitors to grow their market share and in the process have engaged in wholesale price fixing and market manipulation. Once they buy out competing companies they push down salaries and squeeze profit from both ends. They get it by raising consumer prices and by depressing wages. You have nowhere to go except one other competitor who is doing the exact same thing. You can’t vote with your wallet. This is an anti-trust violation. My company is notorious for paying up to 35k per year less than smaller players we compete with in my markets. We work way harder, deal with far more stress and get paid less for it. Meanwhile our competitors are more relaxed and pay way more. Almost everyone in my industry is quitting with my company and getting better paid roles in smaller competing companies. The thing is in about 3-4 years they will be bough out by us or a larger competitor and then the market goes back to being squeezed again. Along with their wages. This isn’t unique to me. P&G, Kimberly Clark, PepsiCo, Coca Cola, the tech industry in Silicon Valley. They’re all doing it. It’s been happening for over 20 years and nobody is stopping it. You want someone to blame? It’s right there. President Biden didn’t do this. But his administration should have started enforcing anti trust laws. If trump gets back into office, he might do it to go after his corporate enemies. Like Twitter or Facebook. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 00:13 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 00:07
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Jizz Festival posted:He has correctly recognized that Bernie is an ineffectual joke. He's not laying awake at night worrying about all the grassroots progressive efforts to raise his taxes or whatever. It's pretty much this. The left in America can't do poo poo and Musk is taking a victory lap on twitter having secured his taxes for another cycle... Musk has legions of wannabes who idolize him as someone they want to be. A guy who has his fingers in all kinds of big ticket items like cars, rockets and battery tech, crypto. Frankly any leftist criticism of him (no matter how well deserved or accurate) is gonna look like sour grapes at this point thanks to the narrative currently in place. He's built an image of himself like he's Howard Hughes or something.
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Nov 15, 2021 06:48
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FlamingLiberal posted:Dems are going to have another seat that they need to hold now Have you seen Leahy? Dude had a medical emergency earlier this year that had everyone freaking that the Vermont governor would appoint a GOP replacement. Leahy is doing the right thing. Even if he doesn't retire he's basically rolling the dice in 2023/24. There's a better chance VT can elect a younger senator to hold the seat. Lets hope the primaries offer someone good.
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Nov 15, 2021 16:21
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the_steve posted:lol Lol play me the world's smallest violin. These are just another batch of loving excuses... Do you have any idea how many times leftist revolutionary groups in Europe got absolutely clobbered before they got anywhere? You want to know what hopeless looks like? Try Russia in the 1800s, or even just after the 1905 revolution. The entire history of the socialist movement is written in blood and betrayal (often by middle class centrists who achieved their mutual goals with the left and promptly sold them out to the conservatives). Almost a century ago left wing groups used to get jailed, executed or exiled on a routine basis simply for meeting up or handing out flyers. You can do all of these things in America with far greater ease than you ever could with organizations like the Okrana breathing down your neck and literally creating leftists organizations for you to join so they can then monitor and control you while you think you're fighting the good fight. It's also a fact that people no longer trust said multibillion dollar media empire. Hence the rise in alternative facts and parallel media ecosystems where people dogmatically adhere to their own made up fantasy worlds. Do you not realize that the OG socialists had to contend with literally millions of peasants who in their heart of hearts believed in the divinity of absolute monarchs and had strong religious convictions? Like you don't have to constantly travel around under an assumed alias, in disguise, from safehouse to safehouse to hide from the secret police. That's what people used to do and they still fought. So when I hear "But the big bad media convinced everyone" I just hear excuses. The real issue here is the left doesn't have an audience outside liberal urban/suburban circles and has been failing to connect with the working class since the 1970s. You don't have the ear of the working class... The GOP do. The left are like socially awkward teenagers trying to court some crush they like from afar without really knowing anything about her or how to talk to her. They stutter out something that at best garners sympathy but ultimately someone else with more confidence and a better understanding of how to talk to people was able to get that person while the teen wound up alone. This is not a new problem. It is historically precedented. Socialists used to go to the same coffee shop as bourgeoise liberals. They hung out in the same circles, went to the same schools and were a minority of a minority of a population that predominantly consisted of agrarian farmers and urban workers. Today it's the same. A bunch of people who went to school with the MBAs and other college educated people who support the status quo and live like HENRYs and PMCs supporting the system, paying mortgages and dealing with the economy as it currently exists. One faction picked the right field to work in and paid most of their bills, the other found lovely employment and became radicalized. Unfortunately there's a lot more people who are either benefitting from generational wealth or have a really nice life where some form of food, shelter, entertainment and sex is available to them so they don't want to rock the boat too much by changing society in a serious way.... This is why the inflation talk is gaining so much traction against Biden. People at their core are ultimately selfish and self interested. They don't want their cost of living to go up. They wanna keep enjoying their lives such as they are, and only want to make modest changes and improvements. But the moment you try to take that away from them or you are made to APPEAR that way, your political future is cooked. Nobody is going to accept short term pain for long term gain. Not unless it's so blindingly obvious to them that it will benefit them in real ways. Everything the left is fighting for is too strange and abstract for the sleeping urban liberals who basically already have a pretty comfortable lifestyle to look forward to that they don't want anyone touching.... So that leaves us with the working class. Historically conservative societies were toppled by apolitical outrage from poorer classes who began to go hungry, cold and unhealthy. It was no coincidence that some of history's greatest revolutions often occurred spontaneously during poor harvests, great famines or tumultuous political events that heavily discredited the prestige and authority of a particular government. It's during these moments that socialist groups usually gain the upper hand if they seize the political moment and are able to convert the raw desire for change, revenge and outrage into some sort of political answer/platform. The GOP have successfully done this for years because they are able to talk to America's working class in words and emotional overtures that they can understand. The left failed to do that around the time they stopped being a working class/social safetynet advocacy organization and became a collection of academics, students and well-todo liberals. Today's left embodies everything that America's working class hates from a cultural perspective... That doesn't mean you lost the working class, it just means you need to learn how to talk to them again and snatch them from the GOP as they have snatched them from the left when the Southern Strategy was launched... That's all you need to do... If it ever happens I would not be surprised if the suburban liberal contingent that voted for Biden suddenly become dedicated card carrying republicans again. TL;DR: The state of the electorate today is a reversion to the historical mean where rural and working class people are now conservatives and culturally regressive while the urban liberals are agitating for change and unable to gain any traction outside of major cities. This isn't new, it isn't remarkable in any way. It will just require savvy messaging, outreach beyond just election seasons and constant organizing and work to find the message that connects with the working class.... I guarantee that an enormous chunk of the current "locked-in" GOP vote consists of poor rural and working class people with a deep distrust of government and government institutions who have support networks built from family and community rather than government and society at large. I think if half this thread ever actually met those people they'd immediately write them off as CHUDs based on surface level interaction. But dig a little deeper and you'll find dilapidated towns and communities that the world has alienated. They're people who have nobody to count on but themselves for the last 30-40 years and they're all suffering from problems like healthcare, poverty and alienation. The GOP have found a way to insert themselves in their psyche via cultural outrage and now the left just needs to win them back by figuring out how these people view the world and framing the material condition improvements in a way that jives with their world view. That's the secret sauce and it was a challenge the socialists of Russia and Europe faced in the 1800s-1900s and overcame to some degree. Some day the US government is going to gently caress up in a bad way that neither party will be well equipped to cope with... For example, the GOP start some kind of skirmish with China and then lose a couple aircraft carriers and get forced out of the South China sea. It doesn't have to be that particular example but something like that will happen and it'll shake national confidence to such a degree that it'll be piss easy for leftists to agitate for another kind of government. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Nov 15, 2021 |
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Nov 15, 2021 23:07
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LionArcher posted:And then they got burned out, because they felt like the message was, "they are bad". and they don't want to feel bad. They haven't slid into being republicans, but they're grumpy about "feeling like the bad guys". And if that's my small sample size of mostly open minded millennials (ranging in age from late 30's to mid 20's), I can't imagine how most of the middle class/working class folks feel. I kinda see it from both sides. On the BLM side you've got more than 400 years of oppression manifesting in different ways in modern times. It's so ingrained in society you can't possibly know what it's like unless you ARE part of the group that's being oppressed. Basically its easy to become self absorbed in your own trials and tribulations and in the absence of context it can feel like there's nothing wrong with the world or that your struggles are the biggest struggles ever. That's what privilege is, you don't even know that you have it until someone points it out... So it's good to be cognizant about privilege. Many of the people who you friends got burnt out by likely feel they have zero obligation to try and be nice to them or explain themselves because it isn't about them or their egos. They'd be right... Unfortunately you don't win new friends and allies by telling everyone they're poo poo and will forever be poo poo. I have no easy answer to this- it's approaching  territory.Having said that I'm reminded of Aeosp's fable about the wind and the sun. Perhaps being more diplomatic and trying to charm their way into what they want is the way forward for a lot of these groups. It wouldn't be the first time a society tried to use media or art to gain international prestige. The Koreans and Japanese have done a pretty good job of this in their own right.
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Nov 16, 2021 03:48
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DragQueenofAngmar posted:kraftwerk I dont want to skip over you addressing this topic with effort and I generally agree with what you say but I think you’re underestimating how much of a sea change modern media and social media is in the propaganda arena here. This is fair. An idea today spreads like a virus when most of the media channels are colluding to make it so. Basically status quo liberals and conservatives are the only people who really have the capital and the ownership of the infrastructure that permits this. It’s privately owned propaganda which somehow makes it free speech because the state doesn’t own it even though it stops all political change. At this rate it could be considered mass mind control. I mean poo poo, you can be angry and agitate for social and political change or you can watch wheel of time on Amazon prime and quickly forget about everything. In that sense we’re in the middle of the largest industrial scale case of bread and games in human history. There’s another tactic a lot of us are missing out on by the way. Social media troll factories: Some of the more uncomfortable and awful stuff the left often gets accused of gets perpetuated by people who aren’t even real. I still remember an egregious example where a woman on a flight allegedly saw a man in the seat next to her get an erection while he was sleeping. She posted a rage tweet about toxic masculinity and how men like this offend her and should have a responsibility to take hormones so they don’t get erections in public. It’s obviously an extreme example nobody agrees with but framed as if it’s being promoted “by the left” and it’s excellent kindling for a reactionary conflagration. We of course know better, the real issue here is men controlling women’s bodies right up to denying access to abortion and birth control pills. So it’s kinda funny to see how intense the backlash is when the shoe falls off the other foot. But also important to point out that there’s tons of people amplifying and posting fake leftist messages that are obviously unpalatable to anyone but the most extremist people.
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Nov 16, 2021 14:46
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Nenonen posted:The number of nukes does not factor into whether there could be a war, as even a fraction of the current arsenal would suffice to devastate both sides and make life very unpleasant for a very long time. According to conventional thinking a full nuclear disarmament would even make a war in South China Sea more likely because there would be no threat of MAD. Or you know, actual nuclear power plants so we can decarbonize the economy. I dislike Bill Gates but this project is a good thing: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/bill-gates-4-bln-high-tech-nuclear-reactor-set-wyoming-coal-site-2021-11-17/
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Nov 17, 2021 17:01
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There are lots of people who have spent their lives being indoctrinated simply by circumstance that a universal program is something they pay for to finance losers, undesirables and lazy people on their dime. It causes unbelievable rage in what would otherwise be potentially liberal people. The idea that you must work and contribute to society is as ingrained as basic stuff like fastening your seatbelt, the laws of gravity or the sun rising in the east. People can't change their minds about this what so ever. Those who do support universal programs of some kind usually do so with the caveat that people shouldn't "abuse" them and they're there for people who are truly in need. When the stimulus checks were being cut and there was extended unemployment etc there were lots of stories about service workers and low income households "putting their feet up" and not working during the pandemic. People speak of these things with revulsion. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 20:55 on Nov 17, 2021 |
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Nov 17, 2021 20:52
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Lib and let die posted:Nah, I think Bernie genuinely thinks he's a lefty, and he's been beaten down into submission by a system that has wholly rejected his politics from top to bottom. He's a doddering old man who's outlived his service to the american left, and he should be at peace with the progress he's made when he passes on. he did good. go, retire, be with your family in your golden days - you've genuinely earned it, bernie. Again, I don't really understand this point of view. Manchin, Sinema and a good chunk of congress have all the leverage. The system as it exists today means that only the left have something to gain from those infrastructure bills which while insufficient to deal with the wider problems of America will still make a huge difference in the lives of a lot of people who would normally have to deal with decaying infrastructure in ways the rich of this country will not. If you're rich or from a rich area you're immune to a lot of the issues the BIF bill tries to fix. We went through a Republican dominated congress and white house where infrastructure week was a running gag. These sorts of public works projects would be right in line with the kinds of Keynesian policies the US was known for after the 1930s. The companies involved with infrastructure will make their money elsewhere if the bill sinks. The conservatives in congress have absolutely nothing to lose from these bills failing. You and many of the other posters in this thread have this all-or-nothing mindset that makes me question how committed you are to left wing causes. It's easy to talk about shooting the hostage and voting down much needed public works projects to make a political point when you are coddled and comfortable in your little enclave. Or you're just so blackpilled that nothing the world does will change your suffering so you want to take everyone else down with you. Like the municpal tax base in rich areas is sufficient to cover their infrastructure needs and many of those people work from home, have easy access to air travel or have other means to bypass many of the problems associated with infrastructure. Baltimore used to be part of America's industrial might throughout WW2 and into the 1960s only for it to decay and become a blighted rusty shadow of its former self. A lot of this money is going directly into the city and will revitalize its ports system which was criticized indirectly in shows like "The Wire" as an example of a long lost and irrelevant economic center. So going back to how many of you seem to be okay with hanging working class America out to dry, I want to question the practicality of this stuff here. If the CPC, Bernie and others voted to shoot down BIF unless the 3.5T bill passed what do you think will happen? Nothing. Both bills die, the Democrats get completely wiped out in congress and we have another GOP Trifecta later on after 2 years of congressional gridlock. Like this at least some sort of material benefit has been provided to the country. But apparently none of that is good enough for you guys. It's like voting for BIF somehow automatically cancels the left and it can't continue to work through parallel channels to get other aspects of the agenda advanced. I find the entire thing stupid and very selfish. I'd love for some of you to get in front of some tradespeople or construction workers and tell them they won't have any work to do to support their families because you wanted the democrats to throw temper tantrums in congress. Manchin is going to be safe no matter what and the GOP have gerrymandered their majorities. Literally nothing the dems do is going to change the electoral calculus for them unless another external apolitical event shocks the electorate to vote for the Dems again. So you might as well take whatever you can get and then continue fighting for stuff outside of the political system which is obviously very much rigged against the left.
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Nov 18, 2021 18:17
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Lib and let die posted:I just want you to know that I read all of this, and this specific line is why I'm not going to bother engaging. I've been very open that the last couple of years have been anything but a "coddled and comfortable" experience. Ciprian Maricon posted:You don't know anything about the posters here so just make factual, moral, or hell even emotional arguments about your position instead this weak-sauce bullshit where you just imagine people who disagree with you can be dismissed for ~*ReAzOnS*~ Majorian posted:These are really unfair things to assume about people that you don't know personally. Not all leftists are cishet white male computer touchers; a lot of us have quite a bit at stake in seeing social spending increased in this country. I want to apologize for my statements here it was spoken in the heat of anger and I didn't mean to offend anyone. I'm just tired of nothing being done in a context where some sort of political progress has to be done because the country is falling apart at its seams and it's frustrating to watch entire sessions of congress come and go with nothing passing except a debt ceiling increase.
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Nov 18, 2021 19:04
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Don't they just automatically take the money out of your account or garnish your wages if you don't pay?
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Nov 18, 2021 23:25
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BigBallChunkyTime posted:Cool so you can go somewhere you don't belong, provoke people with a gun until they attack you, and then murder them. Good to know. This verdict indicates to me that right wing GOP adjacent militias are legal and won’t face consequences for violence against the left. Looks like we just legalized the US equivalent of the black hundreds.
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Nov 19, 2021 21:57
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BetterToRuleInHell posted:Goddamn, Biden just can't escape the 'What did you expect, the president can't say/do that' can he? Why doesn't he cancel student loans? Well, the president can't do that (actually he might, but his admin hasn't actually revealed if he can or not), and if you think about it, people getting their lives crippled by returning debt payments is a good thing, because DUH gently caress YOU!. Why doesn't he address the supply chain issue? Well, he can say stupid poo poo but apparently any and all aspect of what's currently going on is out of his and his admin's hands. Why the boilerplate non-substantial response to the acquittal? Well, he can't shake the boat, per say. The law is just, the law is fair, so sayeth old white man Biden. I don’t disagree with you here but the supply chain crisis doesn’t have a quick fix and is also likely to resolve itself on its own in 6 months. The administration would have to nationalize a few key industries to do anything about it. Or go through an act of Congress to help build stuff that will not come online fast enough to make a meaningful political difference. This is like blaming Jimmy Carter for stagflation and saying he was useless and ineffectual during that period.
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Nov 20, 2021 00:06
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Gatts posted:Could we get help from Canada and Mexico to help facilitate offloading and transport to the US? It'd probably give them some business too. How exactly? You still can’t find the trucks to move the traditional cross border traffic let alone overflow from American ports to Canadian ports which you then have to move intermodally back to America. That’s not a solution either. Those countries are equally dealing with their own logistics and supply chain issues.
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Nov 20, 2021 00:27
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F_Shit_Fitzgerald posted:I agree with all of your points up to "playing the game". We're not going to vote our way out of fascism and white supremacy; they must be defeated by force. The system is rigged not only to perpetuate white supremacy but to frustrate the left and to channel our revolutionary energy into feckless, don't-upset-the-applecart parties that only serve to bolster capitalism/the system itself. Yeah I support this. The liberal centrists already achieved all their political goals ages ago, they have absolutely zero incentive to work with the left except when fascists and conservative reactionaries are on the brink of seizing absolute power. I thought maybe they could be reasoned with and the overtures to Bernie etc meant Biden shifted to the left. But the events of the last 2 months have broken any confidence I have in centrist suburban liberals as allies. I still think the left has a severe messaging problem in that they can’t penetrate to groups of people the GOP currently have a stranglehold on with religion, nationalism and ethnic/cultural grievances. No political revolution can take place without the urban working and rural classes joining alongside you. The left needs to reach these people and activate them into their service but I have no idea how we can bypass the catnip that the GOP provides them with courtesy of MSM and RWM. This remains the sticking point of the entire project. The only strategy I can think of is a loose coalition of ideologically aligned mutual aid organizations who advocate for and protect the interests of their local communities. As described above. As it stands a lot of red states with poor people who vote GOP already have tightly knit communities and support groups to help their members cope with life in impoverish communities. They’re ever present in places like WV, the Florida panhandle and places like Alabama. The left just needs to co-opt these groups and put them in service of socialist goals. I think at this point the democrats no longer care if they win or lose because Trump is gone and it’s likely DeSantis or someone else is going to take his place. The GOP are back to being the party they were just before Trump won his nomination albeit with a larger coalition thanks for the new political awakenings many people on their side developed thanks to Trump bringing them in. The future left coalition is going to resemble the one FDR and LBJ had. You need the chuds. You just gotta give them something more valuable than what the southern strategy provides. The current political realignment has put the Rockefeller republicans in the Democratic Party and made them the majority. We need to steal back the rural working class in southern states to win back the kinds of congressional majorities required to control the govt and shift the discourse to the left. We gotta thread that needle so we include PoC and the LGBT communities of all stripes and gender identity. So the big question is how do we put together people who hate eachother in the service of advancing class warfare? How do we undo the southern strategy? That’s the answer. You answer this question and the centrists and right wingers are toast. At that point either the political system is cowed in our favour or we’ll have enough revolutionary fervour needed to overthrow the system. But one thing I want to be absolutely clear on is that the left must be categorically ruthless, power hungry and un-afraid to engage in unethical and duplicitous behaviour in the name of achieving power for its political objectives. In this I believe the Bolsheviks of 1905-1917 era have the roadmap for this. It’s not enough to be a bunch of intellectuals discussing stuff in academic forums. We need people who are basically gangsters and criminals in our service to do the dirty work for us while providing some semblance of plausible deniability to the overall movement. I am even more convinced than ever before that there needs to be a “dark side” to every well intentioned political movement. I think that MLK would never have been as successful as he was if not for Malcom X working in parallel with him in the same general direction but with separate goals. Likewise I do not believe Irish independence was possible without the IRA. I do not believe Indian independence would have been possible under Gandhi without the work of Subhas Chandra Bose. Every peaceful liberal political movement needs someone else who works independently but in the same direction who provides the stick incentive while the more polite and kinder face of the movement provides the carrot. Kraftwerk fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Nov 20, 2021 |
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Nov 20, 2021 18:23
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Phelddagrif posted:I'm not familiar with Powell, but from a quick search it looks like he's a career Treasury worker who was first appointed as a Fed governor by Obama, and has been praised for the Fed's actions in response to Covid. Could someone more knowledgeable than I explain what actions he's taken that mean he shouldn't be re-nominated? The alternative was a woman with progressive goals like climate change and wealth inequality so there was hopes she would get the nod. But all indicators said Powell would get it regardless. Basically we're sitting in a political moment where we have lots of people who want immediate social and economic change but many more entrenched boomers etc who are happy with things exactly the way they are.
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Nov 22, 2021 19:26
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So suppose you had a good family, one who took good care of you, raised you well never hurt you or emotionally abused you. Lets say they paid off your college education, are saving a nest egg that they plan to leave behind for you when they pass and generally have always encouraged and supported your goals. But for a myriad of reasons they voted for republicans, perhaps due to cultural associations, blind conviction or some other reason. Like their piddly few votes are going to do you way less harm than the total amount of good they've done for you over your lifetime.
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Nov 22, 2021 22:03
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Trazz posted:Again, if they're voting Republican, then they are either ignorant as to the true nature of the GOP(which is forgivable, but they still have to stop voting GOP) or they know what they've been doing for years if not decades(this happens to be the case in the vast majority of these situations btw!) I don't disagree. But some people have zero trust in the government making people's lives better so when they get to choose between vague promises for improved services and lower taxes + higher 401ks they'll prioritize their immediate self interest forever and always because it's all they understand or care about. I understand that most CHUDs are not like this and that they've been ideologically primed to dislike minorities, LGBT people and are basically abusive folks who shouldn't be associated with. But there are families out there whose sole interest is perpetuating their financial wellbeing and existence and have been blackpilled into believing that the government cannot assist them in this and that they're on their own. Which creates a nasty feedback loop of suburban GOP voters who occasionally swing to the Democrats when a guy like Trump comes along! I can't blame them sometimes. The Democratic party has been loving up since Jimmy Carter and it's easy to see how a lot of people might have fully internalized Reagan's " Worst thing you can hear: I'm from the government and I'm here to help" spiel. I think we should always leave the door open for people to turn away from fascism, white supremacy and the GOP in general. We do have stories of rehabilitated skinheads giving up their old way of life and helping others stop being that way. I'm not saying it's common or that we can expect that from everyone. But the left needs all the help it can get and I'm not as keen to shun people as others are unless they're die hard fanatics to fascist and white supremacist ideals.
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Nov 22, 2021 22:40
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Trazz posted:Conservatives have only gotten MORE radicalized in the year since that article was written; they're less likely to be vaccinated and more likely to die of Covid, and any attempts to convince them that they should take precautions during a pandemic has caused them to double-down out of spite. I've noticed that boomers seem to have this tendency to believe stupid poo poo with absolute 100% conviction. My parents for example consume their own parallel media sources (typically stuff out of Serbia) and while they aren't right wingers by any means they have fallen victim to stupid conspiracy theories like chemtrails. No matter what I tell them, they cannot be convinced of reality. In their minds, emotionally or otherwise, the behavior of jet contrails and how they appear in the sky coincides with what they believe to be a shortage of civil disobedience, a rise in covid cases and a change in weather patterns. I try to explain that attempting to disperse any kind of liquid from that high up will just cause it to vaporize into nothingness before it hits the ground or affects the area, and that this is why crop dusters and mosquito sprays have to fly at low altitudes to achieve anything. But nope... doesn't work. It's like the information just bounces off their heads. I consider myself lucky my parents aren't right wingers and instead just believe stupid (mostly harmless) conspiracy theories that keep them from opening their windows every time they notice a jet flying overhead. But logic just doesn't work when a boomer sets their mind to something. It's just true and nothing you say will convince them otherwise. Like think about how many people at airports, airlines and other stuff you'd have to pay just to keep something like this a secret? Even the Manhattan project couldn't stay secret for very long. In this era of internet, camera phones and everything else it's basically impossible to keep any widespread conspiracy a secret for too long... In fact you can simply invent one and people will believe it!
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Nov 22, 2021 23:37
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WAR CRIME GIGOLO posted:Hahaha nah we've been making socialist countries suffer for 80 years without ever stopping. Well on this Trotsky had a point. Even as far back as the 1900s it was evident that capitalism would always become a global force that integrated itself across international lines and would no longer be contained individually between countries. For socialism to succeed it had to spread the revolution until it encompassed the planet. Sadly it didn't work out, and the socialist countries that turned inward found themselves excluded from international trade, became closed authoritarian societies and eventually everyone of those societies that collapsed ran as hard and fast as possible to crony capitalism and never looked back.
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Nov 23, 2021 05:00
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Leon Sumbitches posted:For one, just yesterday, he renominated Jerome Powell to chair the fed instead of literally anyone who understands and is willing to act on the relationship between the economy and climate change. He's authorizing more drilling because I don't think you're gonna completely wean off oil in 30 years. The technology just isn't there yet. You either pull the ripcord and start something resembling chaos now as oil prices skyrocket or you try to buy time with cheap energy while you work on another fix. The issue is they aren't investing in a fix. Western civilization is way too dependent on fossil fuels for us to arbitrarily stop supply of oil without a backup plan. Eventually clean energy is going to replace fossil fuel energy just by free market forces. But you still need to jumpstart it with federal funds which I can see being resisted by the profiteering fossil fuel companies. I think both industries require investment until oil dependence is reduced by alternate technologies.
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Nov 23, 2021 15:55
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CommieGIR posted:Again: He didn't authorize it. The Courts did. Red States sued because he was refusing to authorize it during the pause and review of leases. This gets brought up over and over and its completely taken out of context. I'm not saying the free market will fix it on its own. I'm saying you build clean energy in parallel and eventually you wont be able to avoid using it because it'll be better than whatever the fossil fuel companies are doing now. Maybe I'm optimistic. But the reason everyone's using natural gas and other stuff is because its cheaper due to the high up front costs of setting up a clean energy infrastructure... That's why government investment in R&D and infrastructure is so important. No one else will do it but there's always a benefit at the end.
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Nov 23, 2021 16:25
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