Trust the plan, WWG1WGA

I just glanced at the first sentence and started laughing so much my spouse asked me what was wrong.

Where I live even the janitors are fucking landlords.

I read the whole thing. This reminds me of my parents, who refuse to admit that society had anything to do with my sister’s suicide in NYC thirteen years ago. She also had a small dog like the one featured in this article. To his dying breath, Frum will never admit that his (and especially The Atlantic’s) minimization of covid might have contributed to his daughter’s death.

I shouldn’t be surprised, since words cannot describe how awful Frum is, but it’s still shocking to see.

Maine, especially Western Maine, has lots of dense forest. It would be excellent for a guerrilla war, but the problem is that everybody in the countryside is reactionary. It’s also cooooooold.

In Cuba you mean? That might not be a terrible example.

When have settlers ever radicalized in large numbers though? Usually they just have to be driven out, right?

Wake up babe new space shuttle just dropped

So I know we're pretty much all on the same page here and that it's very much an always-has-been kind of thing , but news about Musk basically becoming Trump's eminence grise has me constantly wanting to fedpost / say things that will immediately get me arrested.

For the record, I spent weeks feeling like Trump was going to win. Then, yesterday, I suddenly started feeling like it was going to be Kamala. I thought that the bourgeoisie would want someone more stable. But (in retrospect) capitalism is of course fundamentally unstable, so we're getting instability regardless of who wins. Even if Kamala had made it, things would have continued to fall apart. The difference now is, I think, that some liberals at least will go back to pretending to care about things. Others will cheer on the various genocides the USA is committing everywhere. Some will radicalize permanently and join us. With Trump, we might get American Civil War 2. With Kamala, we would have gotten (more) WW3. But who knows. Trump basically said that he would surrender Ukraine to Russia, but the dude is a fucking liar and a lapdog of the imperialists so yeah, no telling what will happen there.

Trump's first victory devastated lib me. I radicalized within about eighteen months of that. I also have to wonder now if my lib friends and family members, whom I either don't talk with at all or barely talk to, will become friendlier now. I haven't been able to talk with my lib parents specifically for political reasons. There's a chance that we'll be able to mend our relationship, but if they're just going to veer back into liberalism when the Democrats run Cloned Hitler for president in 2028, what's the point?

Thanks to RCV, this year I voted PSL, then Cornel, then the Greens, then nothing. I also wrote in Nasrallah and Sinwar for the federal-level elections. The lady who helped me scan my ballot was the mother of someone I went to high school with. I was worried she would see what I had written.

This was very kind of you to say. I'm not sure when this particular book will ever be finished. Maybe if I ever escape blue collar work, and return to the bullshit of white collar work? Steve Salaita actually already has a great book about this called An Honest Living that's on libgen. I guess I'll also have to include a chapter in my own book about my abortive political career.

I wrote a Marxist isekai but it’s a novel, not anime 😭

Thank you! So far the prolewiki link has been more helpful, but I think I’ll use that to help understand the quotes you’ve provided from Marx.

This is interesting to me because although economists like Michael Roberts talk a lot about the overall rate of profit falling, they don’t talk as much about the overall rate of surplus value falling. Could that be because profit is declining while surplus value is actually increasing, although the surplus value is just going into the increasing cost of labor…?

I worked as a dishwasher in high school and college. My first job was as a bus boy, and the restaurant owner said, after the first two days, that these days had been an unpaid training period, something she had not mentioned until then. She stole my pay from those days, and then I quit. This was an excellent introduction to capitalism, although it took me another fifteen years to figure out that this system was actually the problem. I think the difference between me and a lot of westerners is that although I'm a slow learner, I do actually learn. Westerners don't seem to learn anything at all, except how to wag their tails when their bourgeois masters toss them a bone from the capitalist banquet of stolen labor.

Anyway

I worked overseas in East Asia as an English teacher and university instructor for years. Started a family and we made the huge mistake of moving back to the USA (I was still a lib). My spouse is a nurse and ended up getting a good job after we were both unemployed and living on our savings and family assistance for a year. I was already a Berner by then but it was definitely radicalizing to go from having excellent universal health care in East Asia to having no fucking health care at all in America (with two small kids) while hearing constantly from white liberal boomers on Facebook that universal health care is wrong and terrible and evil and impossible. My whole family had been using it for years by then!

I got involved in local democratic politics, another huge mistake I've discussed here multiple times. It only became a problem when I started winning elections. I voted to defund the police and the sheriff himself screamed in my face, three feet away from me. I started thinking that my family was in danger and that no one would stand up for us or protect us here. The police would run me off the road one late night, there would be an article in the paper about it, and that would have been the end of me. What would I have achieved, except making my kids fatherless? So I quit.

I was unemployed and publishing novels that made no money for years, trying to get a teaching job based on my extensive experience even though I don't have the qualifications the state requires, and anytime an employer googles me they see that I hate the police thanks to a few articles written by a couple of shitheads in our wonderful local family neighborhood newspapers. I worked as a substitute teacher before the pandemic and really enjoyed it. The kids were actually great, only some teachers were weird (the principals are often unbearable in countless ways). Last January I ended up taking an oil burner technician class, among the hardest experiences of my life. It was free and paid for with covid money. I made it through the class and got a job, and have been doing this shit for seven months now. I'm days from getting my journeyman's license, and have hundreds of pages in a book I'm writing about going from white collar to blue collar work. It's still a bullshit job, just a different kind of bullshit. All of these fucking oil boilers and furnaces should be dismantled; instead, my job is maintaining them. My coworkers refuse to unionize even though all the oil companies around here are desperate for workers, so that's cool. Once I have my journeyman's license, I can do everything except installations (which I don't want to do anyway since they are so amazingly unethical), but this also makes me nervous because a lot of the work is really advanced for me. My employer has been honest and fair so far (as much as capitalists can be) but my pay is still pathetic (I'm supposed to get a raise to $24/hr in a few days) and I really, really don't want to do on-call work, so I might end up changing employers soon. I would rather just work for myself, since that's where the big bucks are, but I still need help from people who know so much more than me, and my license also requires a master to sign off on it. The feudal guilds live on!

"Actually the recording is fake or Epstein was just saying that to sabotage Trump."

My friends absolutely will not budge on their liberalism so I barely talk with them anymore.

My job requires me to visit people’s homes every day. At least once a day someone remarks on the niceness of the weather. It takes so much self restraint on my part to just be like “yeah.” Halloween where I live is always noticeably and sometimes even shockingly cold. Not today.

Lol

The trotskyist who helped a lot to radicalize me (I later became an ML thanks to hexbear) got a good job with the teamsters and is now just a standard liberal as far as I can tell.

I think all of us were assuming that Biden would lose in 2020. I know I was.