We're as atomized and alienated as ever, but now we also can't afford to buy a house or raise kids. Libs will celebrate this.
Look, having nuclear — my uncle was a great professor and scientist and engineer, Dr. John Trump at MIT; good genes, very good genes, OK, very smart, the Wharton School of Finance, very good, very smart
Holy shit Trump posts get me every time lol
There will never be a funnier president.
I'm predicting a rise in church attendance over the next few decades, especially those new age cult-lite churches like Hillsong. People are desperate for community.
At my loneliest I've considered going to a Quaker meetinghouse. I bet you're right
Counterpoint: Nixon was a Quaker.
Join the Shakers. They uphold volcel.
Something something opiate of the masses.
People take the opiate to self medicate an existing problem.
Not gonna lie, sometimes I think leftists in the US should just start building churches, but that teach about Marx and class struggle instead of Jesus. I think it could be a way to fight back against alienation and get people organized and militant in a way that is already familiar to our culture.
Like, just imagine if there was a place in your neighborhood that was a place where you could go and make friends doing fun activities, get free food or stuff like that if you're struggling financially, but instead of having weekly sermons about the bible or whatever had classes where you could learn about marx and stuff like that.
A dozen or so episodes back, the chapos theorized Mormonism is the only religion in America that has enough sense of community (and land/property) to become a serious political power in a the event of a general collapse.
Protestantism will be more like barbarous tribes.
No idea what the Catholics will do.
As an ex-mormon living in Utah, I think that would be the case 10 years ago, but maybe not so much anymore because the church is starting to lose membership and the mormon population is becoming less concentrated due to in-migration from other parts of the country/world in the more urban parts of the Utah.
Ugh the death of the nuclear family was a small blip of hope in this hell world but you're right; it's just the death of the family part not the nuclear part. We are more nuclear if anything...
I don't want to come off the wrong way in this thread; the nuclear family structure is shit and we should always strive towards more communal and egalitarian relations. I'm just worried what we're getting in its place is just as far from that goal. Same patriarchal structure, just with more precarity.
Or maybe I'm wrong, Idk I'm just here to stoke a struggle session.
I’m just worried what we’re getting in its place is just as far from that goal. Same patriarchal structure, just with more precarity.
We should have seen the writing on the wall and got real fucking concerned when corporations started appropriating familial language.
Ugh, just imagine how much less stressful raising kids would be if it were a collective obligation over like a bunch of people that cared about one another.
I like the way Ursula Le Guin depicted parenting in the Disposessed
The same amount of property ownership is going on. It's just increasingly owned by a landlord instead of the people living there. That's not an improvement.
Small business owners are impossible to radicalize because they are not the proletariat. Working home owners still have material struggles besides for housing.
The fuck? There are people who work for a living so they can buy a place to live. The fact that it is a capital asset and literally a necessity for life is not the fault of the working class person. If you live in the thing you own, it's fuckin yours. Renters should also own the homes they live in and essentially pay mortgage on.
Let's not lose the ball here. The problem is not the person who owns their own home-- it's literal capitalists who flip houses for $$$
Homeowners don't have employees to exploit their value and they can be wage slaves like everyone else. They can't exploit the value of their house so simply because, well, that's where they live in, they can't like rent it out unless they move out themselves in which case they have to start paying rent and it is usually a net loss and a hassle. In many countries home ownership rates are much, much higher than the US, and they are far more class conscious.
People don't have a blindspot, it's just that your analysis is weird, and comes from the "good things are actually bad" school of thought. It is funny that you say "American leftists" because America actually has an unusually low home ownership rate especially among developed countries. Leftists living in countries with higher home ownership rates don't share this illusion.
Is that asset enough to turn them away from the struggles of their own class though? Hell, I know a good deal of leftist's who still put into 401k for retirement. Those are capital assets are they not? People have to survive, and it doesn't look like capital is gonna fall anytime soon, who can fault someone for wanting to build a life for themselves. Obvious it's not the most ideal circumstances for radicalization but wanting less people to own homes so it's easier to push them left kinda sounds like accelerationism.
This take is unbelievably wrong wtf. How did you even arrive here?
It’s almost impossible to make a homeowner class conscious though.
At the same time, they need to be taught that it is BAD.
Because UncutRichardJewells is not doing a very good job of presenting their argument. I see, understand, and tentatively agree with a few points, but I had to go through the whole thread a second time to get there.
Yeah, first they start of by saying "This [deterioration of conditions] should be celebrated", with the implication that now people can become proletarians. Only then to later concede that individuals having a decent life is still good but the current form of home ownership does impede class consciousness (which is correct). That, the hostile tone and remarks plus only starting to explain their ideas bit by bit after being pressed by repliers multiple times, make this a horrible way of arguing the right position. Like, this isn't twitter; you can type long comments and expect good faith interpretations. No need for this.
Think of NIMBYs, YIMBYs and the general scaremongering about 'property values' to create opposition to decent policy. Being a homeowner in these general conditions will put you in the camp of small business tyrants if you aren't convinced that social democracy is good at the very least.
