El Derecho de Vivir en Paz by Victor Jara

Anything by Shin Jung Hyun, but especially Beautiful Rivers and Mountains and The Sun

The difference between the old new deals, and any new new deals is the new deals of the 1930s were forced through by a widespread strikes and organizing in every crucial sector. FDR didn’t make labor unions legal, the labor movement was seizing control of whole cities and industries, for years, and forced the labor movement into a state of legal legitimacy. But as soon as that happened, the legal labor movement was subordinated to the federal government. Taft-Hartley, which came after concerted demobilization of the labor movement during ww2, was the first formal step toward the death-spiral of mass labor power.

No social democrat has ever, or will ever, be able to conceive or gestate a new deal, all they can do is use institutional legitimacy to deliver it, and steal all the credit in the process. (The primary contradiction of capitalism according to Marx is “socialized production, individualized surplus”, another overlap between economic and political production.) I know that you know this, but it just can’t be said enough.

We could conceivably get a new new deal that reshuffles the deck a few times, the trick will be rejecting that deal

Tell them you love them lots, tell them they have to love their siblings, that family is important because family will get you and support you when none else will, when they’re a little older and fighting really bad, walk past them and tell them something like, “you know you two are best friends right?” Celebrate differences, try not to compare, make value judgements or set expectations based on personal value.

The DSA libertarian socialist caucus has reinvented itself the last year or so, they put out some good solid analysis prior to convention, and is doing a lot of work to build a libertarian socialist plurality within the org.

Right libertarians arent politically coherent, their lack of coherence means they are shot through with Nazis who exploit unprincipled movements yo plant the seeds of hate. A libertarian could be your uncle who smokes weed but listens to Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan podcast, or it could be a school shooter, a transhumanist tech accellerationist who always brings up Rokos basilisk after a couple Busch lights, or a neo-Randian objectivist.

As a left-Hegelian, I like discourse around human freedom, but people never concretize what they mean by freedom, and we always end up back to Marx:

Do not be deluded by the abstract word Freedom. Whose freedom? Not the freedom of one individual in relation to another, but freedom of Capital to crush the worker.

Oh for sure. Car culture is a blight on the human spirit, its so ironic that being able to drive is associated with freedom, since it is a yoke around our necks.

The psychological effects are so toxically individualist, I’m driving down the road and someone is going below the speed limit, and I get frustrated, pass them, and see its some elderly person. My very first thought is “God who let’s them drive” but then I realize they have literally no choice but to drive, or be driven. What if they have a Dr appt to go to? If they have double seeing or hearing, well we will just ignore that.

I take the vision test to drive without my glasses and I straight up can not fucking see. But I pass the test no problem. Scary stuff

Oh this is one of my favorite stories

I lived kinda far outside of the city that I worked. I drove a 2001 Pontiac Grand Prix GTP, with the 2800 supercharged engine. My commute home often had traffic, and I was tryna get home asap. I found myself behind a car in the left lane, going the speed limit, and I was like manically desperate to get around her.

Finally I have the opportunity to pass, and I roar past her, glancing over to see an older woman in a headscarf, I assume Muslim, with a flip phone wedged between her headscarf and her ear, having a lively conversation with someone. I increase my speed until she is just a dot in the background.

I come to my exit, at the bottom of which is a stoplight, and I wait: white knuckled, sweating bullets, heaving and seething behind the wheel. A car pulls up next to me at the light and look who it is: the same woman, phone to her ear, talking to whoever, oblivious to my existence.

I considered her, then considered myself, and realized I was a fucking maniac likely doing harm to myself and god knows who else, and I didn’t get anywhere any faster than someone going the speed limit.

Then and there I decided to chill the fuck out about driving.

But I miss that car

Pure psychopath shit.

That’s an interesting perspective and I see where you are coming from. But practicality is out the window with the Trump admin. Transparency is practical

Not every conversation, but every conversation between powerful individuals.

And maybe that’s an impractical standard, but the spirit of it is more liberating than letting corruption fester in the darkness.

You’re right, there are secret meetings between powerful individuals that should remain hidden from public knowledge

OK Google

Totally because they are looking out for the billionaires, the people they are supposed to serve

inevitable only in hindsight

I’m not so sure. I’m still friends with a guy who told me emphatically “you dont understand what we did, we destroyed the global economy” and then explained the whole subprime mortgage scam to me, back in like 2007. Lots of downstream businesses, new home builders, paint and drywall companies, building materials stores, started folding several months before the official crash as well. I wasn’t nearly as aware of things then, I was a grown adult but not yet 30 and with little formal education, but there were definitely huge flashing signs. Only the media, based 100% on the words of the banks and insurance companies, thought that a crash was undetectable.

I’m not sure quite what it would look like yet, but I’m willing to bet if you look where these data centers are being built, when the cash runs out to keep the whole scam afloat, these big companies will stop paying their bills. The smaller companies providing services and supplies will run out of money before the huge mega corpos start showing signs, so that is one of the metrics I’m watching closely. I just happen to live in the shadow of these data centers so I’ll be pretty close to it, that is if I’m right.

we’re willing to die

I’ll just sit back

Willing to die in a seated position doesn’t cut it goofy

The 22nd amendment ratified in 1951?

Same shit, different pedophile

Wow the subtext to this image is actually terrifying.

Jesus didn’t die for our sins, he rescued himself from consequences. He uncancelled himself

Seem to be a lot of people posting this so I’ll just repost what I wrote elsewhere :

The 3.5% theory is extremely questionable. The first paragraph of (the BBC) article is problematic if you know like 3 things about Philippine politics.

I’ve dug deeper into the data and it is very opinionated how it defines “success” and violence/nonviolence.

I’m not a pro-violence guy, i defend liberation struggles, but work to create educational/political/cultural revolution. Also the 3.5% mobilized population would be rad AF in USAmerica.

I haven’t read the whole book the study is based on, though I was working on it for a while. But IMO it misrepresents historical fact to make a nice-sounding abstraction, and I’m not sure how people will react to its failure, which would be based on a faulty premise.

We need to be more focused on what we will do with the power that will come from mobilizing like 12 million Americans rather than hoping some members of the political class notice and decide to fix things. The actual problem is that power is kept out of the hands of workers. The thought of building that power and giving it away would be a catastrophic blow to our movements.

The political system is empowered to fix problems, but not equipped. As far as I can tell, the only people who have ever created or fixed a goddamn thing in all of history have been workers.

To the oppressor, equality feels like oppression