Probably George, maybe Ringo.

Sorry bud, but you just can't fly in hot with a dickish reply to someone else's comment and expect them to extend you any grace. Especially when you're not even actually replying to the actual comment but your gross misreading of it.

Since apparently I'm blocked. For any body else who might stumble upon this one. Lovable's assertion that any comparison between chattle slavery and prison slavery somehow diminishes the suffering and plight of the former is a real head scratcher. Especially since the prison industrial complex in the United States was built to be an institutional replacement for the systems of oppression that were banned by the 13th amendment.

Edit: chattel for cattle, auto correct strikes again.

Or maybe work on your reading comprehension? It seems to give you some trouble.

Or maybe get a hobby. Your thinking seems to be about as half-baked as your pedantry.

Have a good day friend.

You see, thing is, not everyone has the privilege of being able to go to college right after highschool. I worked at UPS for 19 years while my partner went to college and we raised two kids.

I quit when they needed to move for them to complete a post doc. I could have either stayed behind to live alone for 2 years doing a job that payed well but was unfulfilling, or I could take the opportunity to find something new. I choose the latter.

We moved, I took a job at the art museum on the campus where my wife was working. A few months later the pandemic hit. I was privileged/lucky enough to get paid to stay at home the duration of lockdown. During that time, I got to think a lot about what was important to me and what I wanted to do with my life going forward. I didn't want to go back to busting my as in the name of capital. Wrecking my body in the name of shareholder value. I wanted to do something rewarding, and in the service of others. That lead me to social work. So I went back to school in my 40's working towards a masters in social work with a focus on community and labor organizing.

You have to open your mind to different paradigms my friend. Everybody path is different and going through life doing things the correct way is overrated.

"Profess to have learned nothing about leftism since the..." WTF are you talking about? really just confused as to what you mean here

.

Sure, maybe, I would argue that that's pretty debatable, whether true or not. If that was the premise of your question though, you didn't do a good job of making that clear.

Yeah... Maybe think a bit on who it is that's actually doing the devaluing here.

Now, now, just calm down there Charlie.

I said nothing about prison slavery. You're reading things into my post that are not there. The point I was trying to make is that the last the last living person who existed as property under what people think of as Slavery in the United States died in 1975. That's either not even or just barely two generations ago.

But the rest of your statement, yeah....idk. I'll just say that people are still being kidnapped, shipped and sold in this country. The mechanisms are different, the justifications are different. The underlying reasons? Not so much.

Yeah, of course I know it's not just one person. But 174, and maybe more, is not much in a country of 346 million+ people. Hell, that's not even half of the number of reps in the US house. They hold no federal offices. They hold no state offices.

They may be the 4th largest US political party by registration, but the DSA has a fraction of that registration and I see them doing so work on the ground than I have ever seen from the Green party.

I would love to be able to vote for a viable leftist 3rd party presidential candidate. Viable. We're not there.

I don't really have guilty pleasures. I don't feel guilty about anything I like. This stupid band comes pretty close though. This shit may not be good but it is fun.

Like what you like. I do not like this record. It was the last Megadeth record I bought and I've listened to everyone since, at least once.

I think the worst part of that album is Dave's voice. I didn't need Mustaine to be a better singer. To me, the more he tried to be, the more obviously deficent his voice was.

You're completely right. I did the American thing that Americans are wont to do. Apologies.

Disclaimer: I am a registered Democrat, but do not consider myself one. Where I live the Democratic primaries are the election. I've never had the opportunity to cast a nonprimary vote for a candidate that represents me.

For me to vote for a 3rd party candidate for the presidency would require that there be a leftist third party willing to build power from the ground up. Local->County->State->Federal until that happens there really isn't a point.

Sanders understood this, that's why he ran through the Dem's primary system.

That's why Jill Stein isn't a serious 3rd party candidate: there is no party.

The Green party is less relevant power wise than the first time she ran. It's a vanity candidacy. Organizing is not glamorous work. It's hard. It's slow. It's frustrating. Stein hasn't shown any interest in doing that work.

In recent history, Ross Peort and the Reform party probably did the most in this direction, but he had billions of dollars to pay other to do the hard work for him.

We tend to over-mythologize voting in this country. It's a tool. It's not sacred. You use it to try to build the best future you can with the parts you have to work with.

Slavery

A consumption strike is still a strike, and honestly could be more effective than a traditional strike.

The US economy is essentially completely reliant on consumption at this point, it's the place where we have the most leverage.

It's also very easy for an authoritarian regime that is inbound by law to retaliate against traditional strikers. It's much harder to force us to consume.

It also doesn't have to be zero consumption, by loca, but used, use cash, barter, and trade.

The web site, meh, whatever, but Youthanasia? That album? I guess I will also celebrate the 30th anniversary of every time I've shit the bed since 1990.

Unfortunately, the reality is that people do not have to put thought into anything before they vote. We would want that to be true, and ideally they would, but that's just not reality.

A more aggressive anti-trump campaign isn't at all what was needed and honestly wouldn't have made a difference. Substantive policy designed to make a immediate tangible improvement in the lives of working people is what has been needed. Regardless an accelerated 3 month timeline probably wasn't enough time to make a difference message wise, given how siloed and disjointed our media landscape is in the United States.

Like it or not, the Neoliberalism embraced by the Democratic parties leadership is just as cult like in it's thinking as Maga-Christianity.

The education system in the United States has been intentionally been attacked and made unaffordable for this very reason. Reagan wrote about the dangers of an educated proletariat. He followed through on a policy level.

At a federal level, studies have shown that the wants of voters have close to zero impact on policy implementation. Unless you have money for lobbyist, your vote largely doesn't matter. Money trumps your vote. Change in the US won't come at the ballot box, it is going to require good minded people to organize an flex our economic muscle. The US economy runs on consumption, and that's where our leverage is. We need to organize a general consumption strike. Starve them of the money they use against us.

It will be painful, but that ship has sailed. The future is going to hurt regardless.

Big picture it doesn't matter if she was right or not

Trump won the election and we all lost because of it.

I understand the anger but I encourage you not to emulate the Clinton/Establishment Democrat deep commitment to never learning anything that might require the smallest bit of accountability.

Judging by some of the recent punditry I have seen from the likes of Axelrod and Matthews they haven't learned shit.

I don't necessarily disagree with you

but

I read a lot and follow the news. You probably read a lot and follow the news. A huge swath of the population in this country doesn't. Self actualization is a luxury. You have to keep that in mind.

I'm sure you saw the article in the LA Times that suggested that apparently a significant amount of the population did not even know that Biden had dropped out of the race. Take a second to really wrap your head around that. If so many managed to miss that fact, how likely do you think it is that they would have heard about Trump's dictator day one statement.

It takes a certain level of privilege to be able to concern yourself what's going on in Washington, what's going on in Gaza or the Ukraine. Those things don't matter when you can't figure out how you are going to afford food AND rent this month.

I've been there.

Dreams are a luxury.

People aren't born, racists, sexist, homophobes, transphobes: we build those through culture.

For many Americans thinking about this stuff is a luxury. They're tired. They work themselves to the bone and still barely get by. They've been resegregated by race and income and all they know is that when they look around, all they see are people who look like them and who are also struggling.

They're fertile soil for the seeds of bigotry to germinate in. I'm not trying to excuse them, just trying to help you understand them.

Trump saw gains in and across groups that have historically been part of the Democrats coalition. It's not just white folk.

Both parties have spent decades largely failing to address the everyday struggles of working Americans.

So, if neither party is likely to actually make improvements in your everyday life, but one party is threatening to blow up the whole fucking system: One is significantly more appealing than the other.

The hate is a symptom of the problem. It's built by policy and, for some, maintained by design for political exploitation.

There is a reason that all of the economic platform of the civil rights movement have been scrubbed from our education system and collective memory.

Race and class have been the main tools capital has used to divide and exploit working people from this countries birth and that's as true today as ever.

We all need to not forget that, and more importantly, not play into it.

I am a white college leftist.

I am also a former Teamster who spent just shy of 20 years schlepping boxes for UPS. I am now taking classes to be a social worker.

What you are saying is at least partially true, they likely don't understand, but it's easy to forget just how young college kids are. The things that college kids don't understand are legion, but they are there to learn, and I think that's worth keeping in mind.

Y'all, we if we ever want to accomplish anything positive on the left we have to start thinking about our tactics. These sorts of left on left circlejerk firing squads don't help anyone, anywhere, ever.

We have to be cognisant of who are our allies, and maybe more importantly, who are our potential allies. We can't afford to alienate anyone potentially useful to achieving our end goals.

I understand the anger and the frustration.

I do.

But we have to learn to talk to people like this guy. Teach them don't berate and lecture at them.

We have to save our vitriol for the real enemy.

A bit yes, but that's not the real issue.

The bigger problem here is that it represents a complete misreading of the situation.

The racism and misogyny we're seeing at the poles aren't justifiable, they are terrible, dangerous things, and I am not trying to down play that.

That said, they are a symptom of the problem and not the root cause.

If you never treat the virus, you shouldn't be surprised when the fever doesn't break.