Yep, classic chauvinism.

I find your comment funny because the person you’re responding to is not the one in denial. They gave you the statistical facts of the situation. I know you want to cynically point the finger at everyone around you being dumber and lazier than you, that you have it as hard as anyone could possibly have it and you managed to do it so why don’t they. I know you want to believe America is a democracy just because we hold elections and the votes that come in are counted.

When you have a third of the population that doesn’t vote for one reason or another, when you have some voters with several times the voting power of others, and the two candidates we get to vote for are donald fucking trump or the person that somehow lost to D.F.T.; it’s time to start thinking about the systems that produced those results instead of passing the blame off on bootstraps and personal responsibility. This is the classic reactionary rhetoric that never leads to anything being fixed, because it exists so you have something to be angry at without challenging anything fundamental to the system. Because you can change systems, you cannot change people except by giving them what they need to change themselves.

The good thing is that human behavior at that scale is actually reasonably predictable, again, given the material conditions that those people are subjected to. Which is why systems are so important.

A system does what it is designed to do, and benefits who it is designed to benefit. Everything else is just noise. Stop pointing the finger at everyone around you and start pointing it up at the people who actually have a direct hand in those systems and profound power to change them. Elected or otherwise. That is the only way that change has ever been wrought in this country, even in the most dire of circumstances.

This quote is an example of what I am talking about though. Roosevelt had to take great strides to ease the great depression, because of mass protest movements at the time openly led by socialist/communist parties, but he could not go so far as to address the economic system that created the great depression. Nor could the capitalist class allow these policies to be associated with the socialists that visibly fought for them. Doing so would threaten the power of capital; this is not long after the bolshevik revolution that created the USSR, so there was major fears of similar movements taking root in the US.

This is not Truman defending the new deal, this is him distancing the new deal from socialism.

The new deal was not socialist, which is by design, but it was made up of things that socialists would have certainly fought for and taken even further if their effort was sincerely meant to achieve socialism.

It’s time to stop letting socialism be used as a scare word. Sure, the loudest ones will continue to bury their heads in the sand, but those people weren’t going to be won over anyways. Furthermore, you aren’t going to win people over by talking down to them, and you cannot address their needs in a sincere manner if your base assumption is that they aren’t intelligent enough to understand their own lives.

edit: I’m also not suggesting that we should be fighting over “the word and meaning of socialism”; precisely the opposite, in fact. I’m saying that we should be living examples of what a socialist is and what socialists advocate for. We should be seen in our communities doing the ground work of organizing and being role models for what we believe in.

The difference between what we are accused of and what we are actually doing is stark, which can’t be pointed out if we’re constantly distancing ourselves from anyone that calls themselves socialist simply because we’re afraid of the word. There is so much present day and past evidence; from the rich history that was erased in the red scare and all of this anti-socialist sentiment; for us to draw on instead of trying to distance ourselves from the reality that what we advocate for is anti-capitalist in nature.

Simultaneously, American voters are “stupid, lazy, or both”, but intelligent and well-read enough to understand what you mean when you explain the difference between social welfare and outright socialism as you are backpedaling on being a socialist.

That being said; I’m not talking about progressive policies, I’m talking about socialism. There might be plenty of progressive policies between here and socialism, but the end of that side of the spectrum is socialism.

The thing is, you can “not call it socialism” all you like. The fact is that it is socialism, you have to respect people’s intelligence enough to know that they will figure that out (or be easily convinced of it, if you really need an argument that doesn’t respect their intelligence). When this happens, and even moreso when you inevitably reveal yourself to be socialist, it will make you look deeply insincere and subversive, because you yourself will have fed into this taboo and not done the work of separating the term from its negative stigma or generating positive media for it.

Socialism is simply the fact of the matter and being socialist means caring about material reality enough to not just lie and gaslight as a means of convincing people. When you get attacked for being socialist, you will not be able to backpedal without sabotaging your own movement, because there will be a litany of evidence that you are socialist. As there should be, or you would not have the support of actual ideological socialists (remember that whole material reality thing I just mentioned).

The material reason why socialism is a “no-no” word is because when the right attacks it, the liberal establishment does what they always do; they backpedal. Not only does this make the right’s criticism look reasonable, because it confirms there is real reason to fear being associated with socialism; but it ensures that the people only ever hear the arguments against socialism, never the arguments for it. All of the arguments which are intrinsically associated with socialism; which you have done all this work to propagate; are never connected to it optically, and the people never learn what it actually is, leaving all of your policy open to attack.

What you are suggesting here is not the solution but exactly the issue that has brought us to this point.

The only way that you will ever launder the term “socialism” is by openly advocating for socialism and calling it what it is when you do. You just aren’t going to beat the establishment at their own game; rather, we must show the people what it is to be respected and hear policy based in material reality that will actually address their needs, and you will win support from across the spectrum.

It’s not hubris though. They know what they are doing and they don’t care because they won’t be the ones hurt by it. They would legitimately rather Trump be president than win by having to adopt any kind of actually progressive policy. This is what all of their actions have shown us. Don’t give them a pass for incompetence, they are just as culpable for the situation we find ourselves in today.

Thanks for the vibes based perspective on the situation.

Fair enough, just dispelling the common notion that “breakfast is the most important meal of the day”. No particular meal is more important than another, just that you’re getting the nutrition you need. It sounds like this is what works for you. Carry on :)

It must feel empowering to only hold positions that are impossible to prove or disprove. Super brave.

I wouldn’t know, maybe you can tell me more about it?

Meanwhile, anyone living in the real world that is actually paying attention knows that what is happening now (in the US and in Gaza) is not normal and is not what any Democratic President would be doing.

This is not an honest response to any of the arguments I made.

You are not a serious person. I will not be engaging further; I have organizing to do that does not involve scapegoating people who will be hurt by this administration or living in alternate realities where everyone unquestioningly does what I want them to do because I said so.

Donald Trump says a lot of things. What he did was get them two months of relative peace. That would not have happened under Kamala, there would be no intermission to “resume” bombing from, there would just still be bombing. If Kamala wanted those voters then she should have broke from Biden’s support of Israel, which she did not do and is not how you get a ceasefire done with Israel. No, what she said is that we would have the “most lethal military” in the face of Palestinians her campaign blocked from speaking at the DNC. Biden said he had red lines, but never did anything when Israel crossed them.

That is how democracy works, you have to earn votes. “Vote for me or else” is not a fucking popular platform for what should be very obvious reasons.

Is it really more important to you to attack these voters and hold back the discourse, over 4 months after the election, as your government is breaking every rule in the book and your party is playing right along with it? The election result is not going to change no matter how many people you throw under the bus for it. These are the cards you were dealt, it’s time to move on and play spades.

Were you not here for the last year of Biden’s presidency or something?

They didn’t have to do either, there was a resolution to fund the government for another month on last year’s funding bill until something could be drafted that would pass.

Breakfast actually isn’t that necessary as a meal, if you’re not hungry or you don’t feel the urge it’s okay to not eat and hold out for lunch with just water. When I eat breakfast it just makes me want to snack more throughout the day.

Removed by mod

The OneDrive plug at the end is *chefs kiss*

Everything you know about these “shitty dictatorships” has been told to you by a media and a government that has a direct monetary (and by extension, power) interest in maintaining and legitimizing the current system you live under. They are free to lie to you as long as they make it believable enough. Not to mention how the ruling class would have profited immensely from assimilating the resources and labor of these “shitty dictatorships”. When that fails, they will profit by generating war and weapons contracts.

This is accomplished by lying and manipulating half truths in order to call them “shitty dictatorships” that need to be dealt with through military action (and destabilization via propaganda and collective punishment to make conditions favorable to accepting capitalism as their way of life). They must justify their actions to the American people in order to generate the least friction within their system, but when it does generate friction, they do it anyways, because their power ultimately lies in capital and not in the people’s opinion of them. This is often when things turn to fascism, but let’s be honest, it’s not “not fascism” just because it’s done in the light of polite society.

This is unique to imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, which “shitty dictatorships” like China do not practice. China takes advantage of western capitalist’s greed to fund their socialist project, but they are not themselves capitalist. They are in what they define as their first stage of socialism with Chinese characteristics, which has already lifted millions out of abject poverty. The presence of a market-based economy does not make a system capitalist, just as the presence of social welfare does not make a system socialist. Being openly vigilant (which likely means far less than you imagine it does) to intentionally subversive western propaganda does not mean they can’t be democratic in far more meaningful ways, without the burden of constantly re-hashing information that has already been proven faulty.

We are the last people that should be telling China how to run their country and media. Because, in contrast,

Americans are, of course, the most thoroughly and passively indoctrinated people on earth. they know next to nothing as a rule about their own history, or the histories of other nations, or the histories of the various social movements that have risen and fallen in the past, and they certainly know nothing of the complexities and contradictions comprised within words like ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism.’

Chiefly, what they have been trained not to know or even suspect is that, in many ways, they enjoy far fewer freedoms, and suffer under a more intrusive centralized state, than do the citizens of countries with more vigorous social-democratic institutions.

This is is at once the most comic and most tragic aspect of the excitable alarm that talk of social democracy or democratic socialism can elicit on these shores.

An enormous number of Americans have been persuaded to believe that they are freer in the abstract than, say, Germans or Danes precisely because they possess far fewer freedoms in the concrete.

They are far more vulnerable to medical and financial crisis, far more likely to receive inadequate health coverage, far more prone too irreparable insolvency, far more unprotected against predatory creditors, far more subject to income inequality, and so forth, while effectively paying more in tax (when one figures in federal, state, local and sales taxes, and then compounds those by all the expenditures that in this country, as almost nowhere else, their taxes do not cover).

One might think that a people who once rebelled against the mightiest empire on earth on the principle of no taxation without representation would not meekly accept taxation without adequate government services.

But we accept what we have become used to, I suppose. Even so, one has to ask, what state apparatus in the “free” world could be more powerful and tyrannical than the one that taxes its citizens while providing no substantial civic benefits in return, solely in order to enrich a piratically overinflated military-industrial complex and to ease the tax burdens of the immensely wealthy.

Also *waves generally at the current state of things in the US*

So no, you haven’t.

Sharpies are made with alcohol-based ink, and alcohol happens to be the perfect solvent for cleaning up dried acrylic paints. So what’s really happening is the tip is getting gunked up with re-wetted paint.

I’d bet you could give the tips of those sharpies a brief soak in some isopropyl alcohol, and/or a firm wipe with a wash cloth or paper towel soaked in the isopropyl, and they could be somewhat recovered (assuming they have plenty of ink in the tank)

That being said, I still would not recommend this practice. Better off with a paint based marker or something.

Have you considered a world where power is based in social welfare instead of capital?

Why are you ‘both sides’-ing populism?

Because they’re still mad that their team lost and they’re too blinded by their hatred of the out-group to see any possibility of revolution or unity beyond the electoralism that has once again failed them for glaringly obvious reasons, which they refuse to recognize, because it’s easier to blame scapegoats; sexists, racists, minorities that don’t vote the way they’re supposed to, people who are just too stupid for their own good; than to admit they or their party should have done anything differently and simply isn’t up to the task of defending against fascism. They aren’t interested in “root causes”, or material reality, or even their own party’s rhetorical strategy; only the letter next to the names of their politicians.

In other words, they have fallen into exactly the same patterns as the enemy they so vehemently oppose. Scratch a liberal.