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i'll be honest i wasn't expecting you to pivot towards being a reaganite
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The Alliance to Restore the Republic is a conservative movement.
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Matt Bruening put out a proposal for childcare benefits program with a very dumb name.
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/family-fun-pack/
https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/family-fun-pack/
i saw people getting mad at this (the policy, not the name) but i still have no idea why
Going to a DSA chapter meeting today
Transition from succdem (scust) took too long tbh.
Transition from succdem (scust) took too long tbh.
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I'd love to hear the story here, but congratsGoing to a DSA chapter meeting today
Transition from succdem (scust) took too long tbh.
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Rosy palms hide my shame.
Not much of a story really, just confronting the fact over the last few years that the Democratic party and liberalism are woefully and painfully unqualified and unfit to deal with the world we live in and staving off the oncoming collapse. There's no point in sticking with a party that has no ideology, stands for nothing, accomplishes nothing and means nothing. Watching everything in 2017 and 2018 just be a bunch of bloviating stupidity and infighting to constantly hash up the primary and learn no lessons because they actually don't care all that much that they lost, watching the world melt around us as nothing changes in any meaningful capacity and in fact is trending downwards in many aspects while everybody smiles and pretends the coming hellscape that they propagated isn't going to kill us all. And just the nauseating self satisfactory hand-wringing (to which I am guilty for sure) over norms and values and all this dumb meaningless shit while people die and the country is on fucking fire like fucking christ some of us are old enough to remember both Bush's and things were way fucking worse under W than they are now, but every day it's more inane dumb shit that doesn't matter clouding up the views on what matters and what we can do as a society to seize back power from the ever growing bourgeois. The Dems stand for nothing but continuing the status quo and I finally had that crystallized.
Socialist theory is the only workable model. The only pony worth betting on. And the only thing that is going to actually save human society if we end up not cooking ourselves to death in a decade.
Plus the memes are just inherently better tbh.
I'm was in the same boat during my transition as well. Technocracy is an illusion. The self-styled technocrats have no idea what they're doing more than anyone else, but they managed to convince their base that they know what they're doing and that when they make a mistake it's someone else's fault.
also even if they "know" what they're doing technocrats cannot solve normative questions
I worked in that end of tech for like 4 years, it's amazing how little of a grasp on reality they all have. It's all empty stupidity to basically be like "I invented the taxi cab". It was really astounding seeing the arrogance of these 23 year olds who've never had to actually work for anything a day in their lives think "I'm the next Steve Jobs" while pissing away millions of dollars on trying to make the go-pro on a pogo stick into the next "innovation".
Nobody in tech lives in reality, it's why I left.
Yes.
When I was bouncing around start ups that show was very much reflected in my life.
From my experience in engineering school, the kids who wanted to go into startup culture (or had startup ideas themselves) were weird. There's such an over-emphasis on "passion" and "grind" and shit. "Let's condition ourselves to be chronically overworked! That's how you change the world." Combine that with the weird philosophical concept of "disruption as preached by SV and that shit is just hell on Earth.
i miss valleywag as them writing up on elon musk getting really mad at the premier event for that show was funny as hell
lmao of course he would.
Gavin Bellson is legitimately one of the best TV villains just because he's such an efficient skewering of SV even if the show is fairly light on conflict or moving forward whatsoever narratively.
Yep, I watched like 6 episodes and couldn't watch anymore because it was just "oh god this is my life isn't it". Except the unhinged technocrats that were the butt of the joke were my boss. I worked for 8 different start ups and not one, not a single one, ever actually produced a single thing.
I work for one now, but they have a product that exists, is in market, and has a practical purpose, and I don't even work on that end I work on making sure the website and backend shit isn't on fire.
Start up culture is bad, is the lesson here.
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uh sir sir sir actually calling it anime is inaccurate because it was it was not made in japan and to try and define it by a specific art style removes the large number of artistically different anime that exist and without the cultural context it is qualitatively different from creations in other countries sir
i don't even watch anime anymore but somehow this still upsets me lmao
to a lot of these types, it just seems fundamentally wrong that it's possible to succeed in politics with big, ambitious ideas that ordinary people can actually understand. they really think that policy should require a PhD and reading multiple 30-page white papers to comprehend
Ah. Maduro gunning down the minorities that Tankies say are his most popular base.
Love the Twitter narrative over the past week. Defend Maduro because his base are minorities. Maduro's cops start murdering minorities. "Well, see, those were counter revolutionaries and there were guns baked into that bread!"
Love the Twitter narrative over the past week. Defend Maduro because his base are minorities. Maduro's cops start murdering minorities. "Well, see, those were counter revolutionaries and there were guns baked into that bread!"
There's an implicit disdain there for the lower, less educated class, and this is conflated with disdain for Republicans and racists (who tend to be low educated) to give it a moral dimension. However the higher educated class is by no means immune from bigotry either though technocratic politicians will pretend they are above such petty concerns owing to graduating from Yale or Harvard.
The lower class aren't idiots though. Maybe they can't write a dissertation about class structures but they can smell the disdain and aren't buying it.
It's almost like people respond to policy and a promise that "we will give you back your future" with concrete policy proposals with firm basis in how to accomplish and phase it out is the only way forward in electoralism.
i know others havd chimed in here but absolutely 1000%. it's uncanny.
I ran into the same kinds of people doing computer science for a major ivy league during college and oh boy.
Well, in my case I've always had pretty radical views on the kind of society I want to live. In my case I always admired anarchism but didn't think it was exactly a workable movement with very workable people. Kinda hated socialism because my parents left Venezuela because of political alignments all the way back in... 1998. Oddly, ancaps were never really my fave. Didn't trust companies enough even back in those days.
But as my life went on and late capitalism got more late post-financial crisis, my contempt for the economic systems of the world just got me more and more steamed up. Seeing the people responsible for the financial crisis get away, seeing Occupy fizzle out with nothing at all coming of it, reading about the raw disgusting garbage the medical industry got up to, learning more about iron triangles and the military-industrial complex that those structures pushed... it all just made me go from skeptical about capitalism to hating it to looking for something more viable.
The big window for me was the Kurdish movement in Rojava, which billed itself as libertarian socialist. Abdullah Ocalan's writing led to Murray Bookchin's writing which led to broader an-soc discourse... and eventually that helped to break through my cartoonish view of socialism itself based on just Chavez. I could actually appreciate Marx and what he was saying in an environment that didn't utterly demonize him. And so right now that's where I'm kind of at. Still learning, mostly trying to get a bigger picture of what else is possible in the radical sphere of thought right now, what other solutions might exist. Libertarian Municipalism and Democratic Confederalism will always be my first loves when it comes to socialism in terms of the decentralized solution that I think is best, but that's part of WHY I like these spaces. There's a lot of less radical people, a lot of more traditional people, at least one leftcom who will tell you your thing isn't socialism pretty consistently and give compelling reasons why... plenty of reasons to hang out even if I don't post much.
Welcome!
I was pretty standard Dem most of my life, being in a pseudo privileged position (middle class Asian) where I could be mostly apathetic about politics. I believed in justice but also market forces and empirical consensus. After 2016, that collapsed for me. I realized people were fundamentally driven by emotions and biases and I started branching out my reading (mostly fiction up till then) towards economics and psychology to figure out why people were doing stuff like voting for Brexit/Trump. From there I realized mainstream liberal thought is mostly a mental shell game to avoid confronting harsh and inconvenient truths. I also started paying more attention to geopolitics and the everyday injustice of the market.
PhilosophyTube tells me Steve Bannon said the future is either right wing populism or left wing populism. I feel that's broadly true. As the neoliberal consensus is unable to stem the tide of right wing nationlism, the task of capturing that popular resentment and turning it towards constructive ends falls to the left. I always had contempt for conservatism and nationalism so that naturally pushed me left until I reached socialism.
Edit: I was a Hillary voter in 2016 but didn't hold a grudge against Bernie or anything. Seeing liberals shadowbox with "Bernie Bros" these days just reconfirmed my ideological split.
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I've always had a natural sense of 'this ain't fair' when it comes to how life works. Not for myself (I come from a middle class upbringing), but what I saw in the world. Fairly basic instincts like 'war is bad' also lead the way left. I only got old enough to really start paying attention to the world around 2008, by which point the financial crash was underway and the Iraq war was incredibly unpopular.
From there it's about finding a framework that explains things for ya. I was socdem (but would have called myself a hybrid between socdem and socialist) for a few years. At some point last year I decided to actually finally read more about what Marx actually wrote, and that, along with this thread, cleared up that although I thought of myself as against capitalism, I wasn't actually looking for things that would truly replace it.
I have to say, the various Marxist-Leninist states of the 20th century really fucked things though. For a long time I was of that classic 'good in theory, bad in practice' attitude towards communism. I really liked what it was saying, but then I looked at the Soviet Union etc...
Finding libertarian socialism has relieved a tension inside my head, that's for sure.
In a word? Capitalism.
In a little more detail: I've been poor all my life, parents were pushed out of the house they hoped one day to own, father died of throat cancer having worked himself to near death with nothing to show for it, having to ration medication when times get tough, capitalist preference of seeing the world burn, drown, and the masses starve than risk their profit, and throughout all this I'm still a fool to some by belief that this isn't right and capital can't save us.
It's a slang pejorative corruption of socdem popularized by the chapo trap house community I believe.
I used it wrong in my post but it's still meme speak and how can memes really be wrong.
That's the pyramid scheme right? I'm sorry for your troubles.
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Just wanna say that I'm a lurker who checks on this thread nearly ever day. I think of myself as of right now more of a socdem AOC/Bernie type so not really socialist but I enjoy reading people's take on various aspects of it and I've gotten a lot to chew on rather than the "cultural marxism" boogeyman that props up online around certain subjects.
Thank you to all who contribute in here and give people like me a lot to think on.
Thank you to all who contribute in here and give people like me a lot to think on.
entering the workforce and being exploited directly by the boss and management to the point of a total mental breakdown while the sa subforum lf was alive and well
What's a Statist?
If I'm not mistaken, you've described the Maoist insurgency in the Philippines as statist too.
Basically just means a situation where the state has more power.
Socialism inherently contradicts statism, as the state is an institution of capitalism.
Socialism is the liberation of the proletariat. The two cannot co-exist as the states inherent existence incites the creation of a class structure and precludes the total ownership of labor by labor.