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~~ American chattel 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.
It would be great if Connect would let us see the url for these sort of links with out needing to click on them. I always worry about navigating to a website that I would rather not.
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.