Shout out black vans of secret police grabbing civilians off the streets during the 2020 George Floyd Uprisings.

Truck drivers are often owner operators on exploitative leasing terms or training terms with their employer that dictate they must work X amount of time or they owe Y training cost, usually in the 10s of thousands of dollars. In addition to this, drivers are typically paid by the mile, which means they’re not paid at all for any time they take breaks, or even while trucks are loading or unloading. Not to mention the razor tight schedule they’re expected to make. Piss bottles, like every other uniquely horrible American cultural artifact, are a result of overworked and underpaid workers trying to make the best of their situation. They’re literally saving time and making money by pudding in a jug.

If reading Marx makes you a tankie, then Emma Goldman was a tankie, and so was David Graeber.

Lmaoo a billionaire famous for working his employees so hard they literally had to put up nets to catch jumpers is running for president in Taiwan? Let’s hope the population has more sense than to elect this fool. There’s no such thing as a benevolent billionaire.

So your issue with him is his emotional intelligence, but you lack the emotional intelligence to separate content from vocabulary. You admit that you would prefer to believe incorrect information just because it came from someone who says things in ways you don’t like. That is an astounding amount of irony.

Probably, that’s the conclusion I came to also. Or maybe the original was for the company that made the template and they didn’t want to make people think that company made it made the meme? Idk.

We traded with China because it was profitable, the same reason we trade with India despite them being run by a literal fascist. The same reason why we support Saudi Arabia, a literal terror state.

Why is extra buff Korra arguing with some anime girl about science?

Studies like this are important to counter the reactionary perspective that giving money to those experiencing housing will just feed addiction.

This is the inevitable conclusion to free-market based economies. The market will pick winners, and those winners will then have a capital advantage over all new entrants, allowing them to outcompete anyone they want, and to use their size to control the market at large. It’s literally built into the system. The attempts at reform we try are rolled back eventually, and we end up in the same place again. Ma Bell broke up, and for a while we had competition across the industry and innovation. Eventually, market leaders were picked, and we end up where we are now, with few options, and little difference between the ones we have.

I’ve managed to radicalize multiple of my blue collar, truck loving, baby Jesus spouting, coworkers. It’s a process, but so was my on radicalization, just a different one due to our different material conditions.

Obviously, you can’t change everyone’s minds, but in my experience, there’s not much mind changing that has to be done in a lot of cases, just education on the root causes of the things they already know and notice.

When one party is telling you that this is the best time in our history, while your wages have gone down for 30 years straight, and the other party is the only one addressing their issues, but is doing so through inflammatory rhetoric and outright lies, it’s easy to see why someone would lean towards one over the other, and why they’d come to believe one sides lies over the other side. The trick is that most rural atomized people recognize most of the same problems in our society, the same way the rest of us do, they’ve just had people telling them lies about why those things are happening.

If you want a mass movement, you have to meet the people where they are. If you want to feel superior, then dunking on rednecks is the way to go. That doesn’t mean accepting bigotry, but recognizing that everyone is at a different stage in their political development, and that it takes a custom catered approach towards each individual in order to best effect said development.

A big problem i see liberals having when trying to change the minds of both leftists and conservatives, is an inability to even consider any aspect of another’s perspective, and a belief in one’s own perceptions as objective reality. In doing so, they will argue against their perception of others beliefs, rather than actually discussing and finding what those beliefs are, or where those beliefs come from.

It’s almost like no one remembers that redneck meant socialist union organizer before it was corrupted to truck loving suburban hillbilly wannabe. The working class is ripe for radicalization, but you have to treat them like full people first, not caricatures.

The indigenous Taiwanese peoples were subject of multiple genocides, at the hands of the Japanese, and then later the Kuomintang. I don’t think they were ever really asked for their opinion on the matter.

A local undertaker and a member of the Lawrence school board attempted to frame the strike leadership by planting dynamite in several locations in town a week after the strike began. He was fined $500 and released without jail time. Later, William M. Wood, the president of the American Woolen Company, was shown to have made an unexplained large payment to the defendant shortly before the dynamite was found

The authorities declared martial law,[33] banned all public meetings, and called out 22 more militia companies to patrol the streets. Harvard students were even given exemptions from their final exams if they agreed to go and try to break up the strike.

The IWW responded by sending Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and a number of other organizers to Lawrence. Haywood participated little in the daily affairs of the strike. Instead, he set out for other New England textile towns in an effort to raise funds for the strikers in Lawrence, which proved very successful. Other tactics established were an efficient system of relief committees, soup kitchens, and food distribution stations, and volunteer doctors provided medical care. The IWW raised funds on a nationwide basis to provide weekly benefits for strikers and dramatized the strikers' needs by arranging for several hundred children to go to supporters' homes in New York City for the duration of the strike. When city authorities tried to prevent another 100 children from going to Philadelphia on February 24 by sending police and the militia to the station to detain the children and arrest their parents, the police began clubbing both the children and their mothers and dragged them off to be taken away by truck; one pregnant mother miscarried.

The national attention had an effect: the owners offered a 5% pay raise on March 1, but the workers rejected it. American Woolen Company agreed to most of the strikers' demands on March 12, 1912. The strikers had demanded an end to the Premium System in which a portion of their earnings were subject to month-long production and attendance standards. The mill owners' concession was to change the award of the premium from once every four weeks to once every two weeks. The rest of the manufacturers followed by the end of the month; other textile companies throughout New England, anxious to avoid a similar confrontation, then followed suit.

Is this really a post both gatekeeping poor hygiene and implying it is positive? Gross dude, take a fucking shower.

I wasn’t aware that multiple times a day hundreds of thousands of people come to a complete stop on the trains and move at less than 10mph for miles, where is that?

If a person would rather allow land to go fallow purely because of profit incentive, and that fallow land will result in the suffering of others, the only moral thing to do is dispossess them of that land. They weren’t using it anyway apparently, in this hypothetical.

You value your own personal gain over the human rights of the majority of the country. No one makes you vote for them, you choose to because you’re selfish and greedy and don’t care about things that don’t effect you. Any other reason you give is a rationalization.

When i went to school in my states capital, I rode the bus there every day. I could drive there in 1hr, then pay between $4-40 for parking depending how well I trusted a lot. Riding the bus took 50m. It bypassed all highway traffic and had its own lane, and even with stops it still was faster than driving.

I think if we prioritized transit, people would be amazed how efficient it can really be.

Honestly, I never heard about it again after that, but I also didn’t go specifically looking, either.

What motivation could one have for voting for a party that is desperately trying to institute christofascism that doesn’t imply a myopic, selfish worldview?

You haven’t been here long, and weren’t in the old 196, because I’ve been discussing politics in 196 for at least 2 years, 6mo of that here, and the old 196 was 85% political memes, mostly trans positive and pro left content. In fact, this meme came from 196, as did every other one I’ve posted in here previously.

Libby is the service my library uses. The state capital gives everyone a free library card also, so I get access to a much wider library than i would otherwise. Bullshit the restrictions publishers require, like forcing the library to buy a license for each “copy” of a book it loans, but libraries are still fighting the good fight more than anywhere else I know.

Really? Where has this happened? Which countries have been able to reform away the exploitation and coercion inherent in the capitalist economic structure whilst maintaining it?

Source?

I laugh at this every time I see it, but I also like to point out that Rage was, in fact, extremely explicit about what machine they were raging against.

Lmaoo. Mass starvation happens in this world under capitalism The Israelis are purposefully inflicting it upon Palestinians. The US is purposefully attempting to inflict it upon Cuba. So when starvation is the intended outcome, it’s okay? But when it is an accidental consequence of industrializing a nation of uneducated peasants with a less than 30 year life expectancy, and is followed by decades of life expectancy increases and increases in quality of life and equality of rights, that’s not okay?

I get it, suffering is okay if it’s the status quo, but if it happens in service of doing better, that’s not okay, so we should just be happy with the status quo, where the vast majority suffer daily indignities and violences, and are forced into exploitation by coercive structures.

You benefit from the current system, so the suffering of the many NOW is less real to you than the potential suffering of yourself in a situation that when enacted had objectively raised the quality of life for the vast majority of people who live in the societies where it was enacted, by all objective measures. Is that it?

Except it is. The party sets the platform, not the individual. Individuals who go against the platform, on both GOP and Democratic sides do not receive funding from the party. 95% of Democratic votes and 99% of GOP votes are cast on party lines.

Christian fascism is well defined, I guess if you’ve had your head under a rock for the last 10 years you might not have heard of it, but it’s not a new term.

Christian fascism is a term which is used to describe a far-right political ideology that denotes an intersection between fascism and Christianity. It is sometimes referred to as "Christofascism", a neologism which was coined in 1970 by the liberation theologian Dorothee Sölle.

Chris Christie, the politician famous for using his office to punish entire cities for not endorsing his re-election campaign? That one? The same one famous for being an advisor to former president Trump? The one who doesn’t support reproductive rights for women, a position famously inspired by Christian morality? Yeah, he’s a Christofascist.

Christofascism is a far right political ideology that seeks to install Christian fascism. They are famous for advocating political violence against minorities, using weasel words to mask their intentions, and more. Whether or not ALL GOP members are christofascist is irrelevant, as the party platform is christofascist. Meaning, regardless of what you claim to believe, by supporting the GOP you are supporting the rise of fascism in America.

The US military hasn’t ever won an asymmetrical guerrilla war, so it’s not as absurd as you think. In that Instance, millions of people would likely die, but it’s still more likely that guerrillas survive for decades than it is the US wins.

I totally agree, mainstream media is a dog and pony show in most regards. The trick is to educate yourself on political economy, propaganda, and ideologies, so that you can extract underlying meanings behind much of media. For example, by coming to understand the concept of manufactured consent, and the role the private media in the U.S. plays in reinforcing state ideology, you can more clearly see the role that they played in creating support for actions the government intends to take, eg. The rapid spread and use of misinformation and failure to effectively fact check State Dept claims during the lead up to the war on terror. The media was effectively complicit in ensuring that any deviation from the party line they were to hold was sidelined, and even when presented, made into a straw man for ridicule. We can also look to former CIA and FBI officials who publicly acknowledge their use of human assets, either knowingly or unknowingly, to spread false information and create a desired public response.

I could say more, but I just got a video call, so I will have to stop here.

I don’t like this meme. I’ve met people in the real world who genuinely think birds aren’t real. Now, those people are obviously idiots, but this meme has gone too far. Hell, the subreddit was about 50/50 with trolls and true believers.

True capitalism is what we live in. Competition has winners, those winners gain outsized advantages. They use those advantages to purchase regulatory frameworks which benefit them. This is inevitable, and has happened in every single capitalist society in the history of the ideology. Monopoly is the natural end state of capitalism. (Actually, fascism is, but monopoly happens along the way also)

Idk, I’d be willing to overwork myself if it were for a really good cause, like ending hunger, or rapidly building houses that will be provided free at point of use to unhoused and low income people, etc. definitely not a normal job I’d do it fit though.

What if, instead of a train that can hold thousands of people and move them quickly and efficiently, we made a tunnel and had cars drive through it one at a time?

Surely, if we just give the police 80% of our cities budget instead of 70%, they’ll stop murdering innocent people and harassing minorities!

Many cities are literally being held hostage by their police force, who threaten to not only not do their jobs if held responsible for their actions or if their budget is lowered, in some instances police themselves will vow to become criminals if they are held to account.

The police system is literally strong men blackmailing entire communities into funding their own oppression.

Artist is Rory Blank

@bonejail on Twitter

@roryblank on Instagram.

Thanks to ForgetReddit for pointing out whoever I nicked this from had cropped out the artists name.

Aww. I really loved being on blahaj, but it’s not worth causing that kinda stress on our sweet admins. I support wherever you decide to move us, except Reddit, but I think you’re already on the same page.

Is there anything we can do in the meantime to help contribute to the admins or to help otherwise?

Thanks for running this space, Its my favorite in the fediverse.

Yeah Fuck the Warsaw uprising. There’s no Reason to ever rise up against your oppressors. They should be content to go through the legal process to change things. Israel has never committed actions that make peaceful protest impossible, like shooting over 3000 Palestinians who were in a peaceful dance off at the edge of their concentration camp. I mean, Israel is only going after Hamas, it’s not like they’ve been systematically bombing the West Bank, where there is no Hamas presence. They’re only going after the leadership, which is why they’re bombing Lebanon, not Gaza, because as we all know, none of Hamas leadership resides in Gaza.

White Americans: WE STOLE THIS LAND 400 YEARS AGO, GET OVER IT!

Also White Americans: ISRAEL BELONGED TO THE JEWISH PEOPLE 2000+ YEARS AGO, THEY DESERVE IT NOW!