Every analysis of war between NATO and Russia and/or China will fundamentally result in a NATO loss because those countries would not be the ones trying to conquer people on the other side of the planet.

The lowest price on the shelf where I work is $5 for a dozen. There are none of those though.

There are $6 and $8 dozens of the store brand. I think they’re organic. The highest cost dozen is like $14 I think but they’re the super organic bougie ones.

The store has been receiving less then a quarter of the eggs getting ordered too so the shelves get wiped out fast.

On top of that product is sometimes insured against theft/loss and iirc it’s a tax write off too.

I’m not really sure what point you think I’m ceding. Is it that we shouldn’t replicate the housing solutions of the post-war Soviet Union because we don’t live in the post-war Soviet Union? My point is that Marxist solutions to the housing question are based on the existing conditions, not caricatures of what the Soviet Union did 70 years ago.

I don’t really know if Marxism is relevant here

Marxism specifically is relevant here because the housing market in the US and many parts of the imperial core is the premier example of how capitalism turns in on itself and hinders the development of the productive forces in the name of profit. Capitalists will never build enough housing because the market values scarcity and the housing they do build will be as detached from social consequences as it can be.

This doesn’t mean we should want a bunch of ugly concrete apartment blocks built and administered directly by the central government everywhere (no offense to those who do), but socialism would mean structuring our economic system in a way that the state and private sector could be mobilized to build in excess of what we need rather than significantly less than what we need and to build it where it needs to be.

I’ve been at the new Project Zomboid build. I’ve settled into one of those big houses with tall fences in the south of Muldragh and I’m trying to set it up for long term. The late game stuff seems a lot more developed now with significantly more complex agriculture, smithing, and crafting. It’s kind of all too much for single player though, like it could take months if not years of ingame time to master all of it and it’s also easy enough to loot that it’s like why bother?

Idk I’m having fun at least.

it seems like it’s sorta working more

The lower classes have always been vaguely supportive of or at least not opposed to terrorism whether it was 19th century anarchists or 20th century guerillas. The problem is that assassination and other forms of terrorism have never moved the masses into action. People might agree that the victim got what they deserved, but they’re just voicing the opinion they already had - that health insurance companies are evil - and historically there’s no evidence that an assassination will spur them to act on that thought.

And this is what comes out while he has almost a month of his presidency still left

Sony Ericson Z525.

That sounds like a good start. When I ran the membership committee in my area we ran some surveys and it was sort of helpful to identify the structural barriers to participation.

Making an effort to just reach out and talk to less involved members on a regular basis can be surprisingly effective too. I wanted to do more of it but nobody really wanted to pursue it with me so it died.

My great grandmother lived and worked in lumber camps for her first thirty years and then textile mills for thirty more. She smoked like a chimney and started every morning off with a screwdriver. She lived into her mid 90s. Sometimes I wonder if I should be more like her.

Lol I talked to some RevComs a few months ago. When I tried discussing labor politics with them they had no idea what I was talking about. Then they told me they knew someone who was organizing at the company I worked for. Then they asked me to join the party.

After a month of trying to get in touch with the person organizing, they told me that the effort had stalled out, they were never really involved to begin with, and they were probably going to quit in the near future. Then they asked me to join the party.

I did the math out in here maybe a week after the election and it was pretty clear that even had all third party voters voted for Harris it wouldn’t have made a difference both in the popular count or in a number of swing states. Trump’s success is because he gained a lot of votes from 2020 and Harris lost a lot. I haven’t seen breakdowns of the numbers but I would guess it was mostly abstainers or libertarian voters in 2020 that came over to him this year, not former Biden voters.

When I was in the organization I found that their internal organization was genuinely horrific and it was no surprise that they could barely do anything except glomming onto Democrat campaigns. You should focus on identifying who your members are, where they work, what they want to do, and what skills they have and how you can get them to be active. Train them to be semi-cadre who actually have a degree of discipline, education, and investment in the organization. Then you should work with them to identify and solve the issues they face, especially if they’re genuine proletarians.

Or on the flip side people acting like this act of adventurism is productive. The 2020 revolt is instructive that huge masses of Americans can say they want something and then just not do shit to actually achieve that goal. Why anyone else thinks this is different now with huge masses of Americans laughing at the death of a CEO is beyond me. The new CEO of UHC, who they were able to hire in like two days, has already said that this will not change their operations in the slightest. The American government is already quite clear that this will not change anything. Does anyone really believe that this will spur the American public into revolt? Maybe anarchists I guess. Maybe “Marxists” so desperate for anything good that they’ve strayed into Narodism. Either way it’s basically never worked because it circumvents the hard work of organizing people and fighting as a class and not petite bourgeois individuals.

It will happen against the ruling class more but only because random acts of violence will be happening more generally.

Anyone saying this is the self determination of the Syrian people is a snake or a fool. The country has been illegally occupied, bombed, sanctioned, and flooded with weapons by foreign powers for the last 40 years. I had no particular love for the Baath government but it’s extremely clear that Syrians were not allowed to sort their issues out themselves independent of foreign interests. That after two generations of foreign meddling a significant portion of the population aligned with US imperial interests either of their own accord or supported by the US is of no surprise.

And now look, Israel is taking advantage of the situation to grab territory, fascists are in charge, and it seems unlikely that Russia will be forced out, so who even wins here? Only the imperialists that want Syrians chained down and exploited.

When I first moved out of my parents and into a tiny studio I refused to use the landlord’s washing machines and dryers in the basement of the building for some inexplicable reason so I hand washed my clothes and bedding and air dried them. My comforter was too big for the sink so I cleaned it by getting undressed, putting detergent on it, and wrestling it in the (standing) shower until it was thoroughly soaked and soaped. Then I’d rinse it off and wring it out as much as possible and hang dry it.

When I was in college I fermented large batches of apple and grape juice concentrate into something that could be called wine and I washed my equipment in the dorm showers. Definitely weird but I never got an infected batch so it was clean enough.

just keep hammering them with questions and don’t let them slip about with vagueries or cliches until they agree that the working classes can only be defined in contrast to the owning class.

For example: wtf is a “scientist”? A sociologist is a scientist who might do dozens of interviews to solve a problem. A biologist might trek into a swamp many times to collect water samples. A chemist might be dealing with extremely hazardous chemicals, far more dangerous than anything most workers deal with. This is all work by any means, and at most these people are petite bourgeois, but the vagueness of some “scientist” allows it to mean some dude in a lab coat with a clipboard that jerks off all day for a six figure salary. Don’t let them be intellectually lazy

I think it’s also worth noting that there are plenty of contradictions within the “working class” and that the “Proletariat” (which is the class of most interest to Marxists) is not synonymous with “working class”.