It’s unshielded street lights for me. If you absolutely have to have a lit street/front yard/parking lot, fine, but the light should cover exactly that area and nothing more.

Well, we should be within our rights to ask our neighbors not to shine their lights directly through our bedroom windows at night, but unfortunately I realize that’s not the world we currently live in.

I didn’t think I’d have to say this, but the conditions in which we exist are created by the system under which we exist. As Kamala said, you didn’t just fall out of a coconut tree.

It also wasn’t just smooth sailing up to this point; capitalism suffers crises like these on a regular basis. For example, the 15 recessions just in the years between great depression (1929) and the COVID-19 pandemic (2020).

A system is designed to do what it does. If it doesn’t do what the designers intended, it gets changed. Otherwise, it stays the same. You would think if these results were unintended, the system would have been changed by now.

let’s work on making sure the only dictator is the working class ✊🏾

as for nobility, well, nobility doesn’t mean much if working class doesn’t lend it any political or economic power.

I can think of a myriad other reasons than sheer cost

Tell me what those are and how they can’t be solved with capital

downvoting

They’re fake internet points, you don’t get anything for them. You said something and people expressed disagreement. Don’t sweat it.

People say landlords provide a service that is providing housing to another person without them having to pay the full cost of homeownership. Yet, because the landlord is not only covering their costs but extracting as much profit as the market will allow, the cost and experience of renting is pretty damn competitive with that of ownership. So to answer your question,

Are landlords supposed to protect people from increasing costs of home ownership?

Yes, that is the way most non-landlords justify the existence of landlords to themselves. The alternative is to acknowledge that landlords exist only for the sake of enabling the owning class to generate capital for themselves by exploiting the working class.

He really just does it as a hobby. Love of the game.

Dog, dog is the word

lol that’s not what I’m referring to. What they call themselves doesn’t matter, what matters is whether their policies/laws and/or philosophy/ideology align with neoliberal principals. In other words; we only care about the material reality of the matter. This is because Marxists follow a framework called dialectical materialism.

Words, especially those which a politician or lawmaker uses to market themselves to the public, are not material. They can’t be measured in any meaningful way and they don’t necessarily reflect reality. (You can, however, measure the material indications and effects of those words if you’re inclined to do so, but that’s besides my point.)

War is peace, apparently.

annihilation. great try though.

Put the rice in with the chicken. Problem solved.

nah. you will not catch me using a plastic receptacle in anything that gets hot enough to boil water. not on a regular basis at least.

Oh you know, only the ones making the laws.

I don’t think we should waste our time trying to convince fascists of anything (most of whom are the wealthy elites we outnumber anyways), other than by carrying out the consequences of their actions. Their interests are simply not aligned with ours.

That’s okay though, because threshold number of people required to disrupt the system and make real change is much smaller than you would think. All it takes is coordination between those of us that believe in upholding the dignity of the working class, and we gain that coordination by organizing and spreading class consciousness.

The thing is that most of the everyday people in the US already agree with us. Even Republican voters. Most people believe that housing, food, and healthcare should be affordable; that there should be real solutions to homelessness and crime; even bodily autonomy (pro-choice, gender affirming care) is popular among the people. It’s just that neither party puts up real solutions, both of them make excuses for why those things are not possible, and the Republicans are really good at making up scapegoats and creating non-solutions that sound really good to someone already conditioned to accept them, which the Democrats generally play along with and split the difference rather than putting up any real challenge or counter-argument.

As for the aesthetics of socialism, even Castro eventually had to spell out that it was, in fact, socialism that was responsible for all the gains they had made since their revolution - that the bogeymen they were so afraid of were simply projections made by their former oppressors. Working class consciousness doesn’t have to be 100% before anything can ever happen. It can grow as a result of our success after the fact.

Why is that? Have you ever spent time thinking about how that would be any more or less possible under the current system than, say, seizing the wealth of billionaires and socializing it back to the working class? How would the latter ever be possible by any means short of revolution, especially now if Trump gets his way? What will you do when the ruling class doesn’t put that kind of relief on the table? How much oppression and destruction will you consent to, if you believe liberation is not possible and things can only get worse from here?

If you don’t believe in it, you won’t fight for it. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. That’s exactly why our system does everything in its power; both to obscure revolutionary working class history, and to inflate the state’s ability to repress dissent. So I’ll repeat this until the day I die: it’s been done before under worse circumstances.

Russians and Cubans were under brutal dictatorship. Haitians were completely enslaved by one of the most powerful colonial forces in their time. Vietnamese guerillas successfully fought off invasion by the single most militaristic nation in the world, and they aren’t alone in having done so (see North Korea, Afghanistan, Iraq, so on). If I could speculate, I’d say China’s political and economic situation in 1950 is a pretty reasonable outcome for the direction we’re heading now in the US. Regardless of how you feel about what came after each of these struggles, the factual reality is that these weren’t armies sponsored by any state. These were working class people fighting directly against the states that profited from their exploitation.

All of those people got organized and won liberation from their domestic oppressors, doing their part to weaken the empire, despite what would seem as insurmountable odds to a disorganized worker. It’s on us now to organize ourselves against our own oppressors, to get them off both our backs and theirs, and we can’t do that without maintaining optimism about our ability to win should we fight. We know that Fascism can only exist for so long until it cannibalizes itself. As a collective we are capable of beating it long before that comes to pass. If we allow the state to beat that optimism out of us then we are only greatly delaying our liberation and doing the ultimate disservice to our people.

“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

Is this about windows always turning on/waking my computer for no god damned reason every few hours, thus ensuring my computer is always on?

sprife

The only time I’ve encountered VGA was my first year as an intern, my office had given me a 4:3 flat screen monitor which frequently gave me migraines. Thing had to be older than me. That was 7 years ago.

If I encountered it before that, I wasn’t aware of it because I was a child and wasn’t responsible for plugging in the monitors I was using.

Just so you know, this link shares your substack username with everyone who clicks on it, and more than likely links them to you in the background. Everything after “?r=” is a unique hash linked to your account.

PSA for everyone else: You are sharing URLs with Tracking Links. Please stop.

You might feel that way, but committed ideological liberals would strongly disagree with you.