Thank you!

Thanks!

Materialist answer (inspired by a video called Why The Political Compass is Wrong: Establishing An Accurate Model of Political Ideology, by breadtuber Halim Alrah… and also Jane Elliott’s famous experiment)

Business owner makes money by paying workers to produce widgets at $6 / unit. Owner sells these widgets at $10 / unit, making a $4 profit each sale.

Before long, the workers catch on to the reality of the situation: the owner could be making a lot less and still be able to provide “leadership” (or whatever it is he provides). They decide not to work for less than… $8 per unit. With this price, the owner will still be wealthy (the business makes hundreds of widgets, after all). But now, so will the workers.

So the workers save up money and use it to go on strike.

However: business owner comes up with a better solution to the problem: he divides the workers into brown-eyed workers and blue-eyed workers. He then uses his money to discriminate against the brown-eyed workers. His cronies in government make it legal to deny brown-eyed workers jobs and housing. His cronies in the media write hysterical anecdotal stories about various brown-eyed rapists, thieves, and murderers.

Terrified mobs – stoked into a frenzy by the business owner’s well-funded propaganda – tear down brown-eyed people’s homes and food supplies, leaving them destitute before the strike is done.

The brown-eyed workers now must choose between returning to work for the business owner at $5 / unit… or starving to death.

The blue-eyed workers, meanwhile, have just been tricked into betraying their own team. Some were not tricked, but simply unprepared. These unprepared workers stood by in either shock, uncertainty, or laziness, unable to comprehend how their fellow blue-eyed workers could have become so foolishly self-defeating and cruel.

But now the business owner can put up the illusion of no longer needing the blue-eyed workers. He can run his factory on a skeleton crew of desperate, brown-eyed workers, and say to the blue, “uh oh! Looks like the brown-eyed workers just stole your jobs!”

Much like the brown-eyed workers, the blue-eyed workers have a restricted set of choices: A) admit they were suckers --fooled into attacking their own team – and try to apologize and rebuild their union, B) double down and blame brown-eyed people for undercutting them… but reluctantly return to work, because the strike is broken, or C) just like the brown-eyed workers, they can choose to starve to death.

(A) will be the most difficult. As Mark Twain said: “it’s easier to fool people than convince them they have been fooled.”

The business owner wins, and now society has an eye-color-discrimination problem. Eye color was an arbitrary characteristic. Yet now it decides where someone lives, who they spend time with, and what kinds of opportunities they have access to.

The business owner can rinse and repeat for: skin tone, religion, country of origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, etc. As the saying goes,

“Divide and conquer.”

You asked why trans people are currently the subject of fear and hysteria? No reason. Not any new reason at least. Trans people are different. Any and every difference between workers is an opportunity for those fatcats rich enough to own “The Daily Mail” and the “The New York Post” to separate us into camps and drain us dry, one camp at a time.

I voted for Harris, but I feel like it’s pretty obvious why someone would vote third party instead.

One need only reject the premise that voting should be a strategic act of harm reduction. Mind you, I’m not saying “is” here. I’m saying “should be”.

We may not take their approach, but you have to admit that there’s value to it. They are embracing the world as it ought to be, whereas we are trying to work with the reality of the situation as we perceive it.

And we could be perceiving incorrectly. For all we know, Trump could loose-cannon his way into making Netanyahu’s whole party lose their next election. It may not be likely, but nothing in this world is certain.

For all we know, the Heritage Foundation could destroy so much of the government and economy so rapidly that it weakens all of the property rights and FBI operations aimed against self-sufficient mutual aid, and communes start springing up all over the place. It’s not likely without massive turmoil, starvation, and bloodshed. But however unlikely, we cannot predict the future!

Cyncism is costly in terms of mental health and well-being. In order to choose pragmatism over principles, we must accept a reality where no good choices exist. But that’s not something we can do everywhere. We can’t repeatedly choose the “least miserable option” and still be able to hold ourselves together and function. It’s just not possible.

Humans need hope to survive. They need a hill they can hang onto. They need to be able to say, “on this ground, I fight for what should be rather than what is.”

Some people’s hill is their ballot.

I see the question differently.

Tl;Dr:

I think OP is hoping to read the 21st century equivalent to Muck Rakers.

Long version:

A whole lot of improvement in American quality of life came about as a result of publications and journalists called Muck Rakers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

They didn’t cover false stories. They simply covered stories that newspapers owned by capitalists tried to cover up. Things like, “physical abuse inside of Factory A” or, “employees at factory B reject union contract.”

It’s similar with r/antiwork. Most of America never realized why PopTarts were shipped with serious defects for a few months in late 2021. To most people, the quality declined out of nowhere, with no explanation.

And I don’t think most people realized the real reason California’s ports got congested. (It was a bill designed to protect gig workers – it required shipping companies to pay truck drivers for the time they spent waiting for their trucks to be loaded (instead of just the time they spent driving)).

People didn’t know because, even if current events directly impact everyone’s lives, all it takes is a few corporations deciding, “you don’t need to know about that” and access to the information through mainstream channels is shut off.

Everyone using r/antiwork knew though. They knew why there was a shipping crisis, and they knew why the glue that was supposed to seal the outside of the box of Cheez-its was now instead gluing the individual Cheez-its together.

News that wasn’t considered, “newsworthy” outside of r/antiwork got intense coverage on that subreddit.

And yeah, the subreddit was certainly biased against those corporations. But biased or not, its users were more up-to-date on those events than anyone outside of the sub.

I don’t think OP is asking for a leftist perspective on the same current events everyone else is covering. I think OP is asking for true, well-investigated stories that capitalists simply won’t air on the major networks.

You know: Muck raking.

Alternatively, it’s possible cell companies like T-Mobile will lobby against these anticompetitive agreements, since it does reduce their number of potential customers. I don’t like cell company lobbying any more than ISP lobbying, but in this case, let them fight.

Something tells me T-Mobile’s got a little too much class solidarity to have any interest in reducing the profits of Charter Communications.

Hmm… so an approach that would have gotten Rodeo’s point across better might have been to say,

“so anarchy is just another name for the purest form of democracy.”

Because democracy is such a broad word that it is occasionally applied to the United States, despite the CIA’s history of coups and the FBI’s history of extrajudicial assassinations of citizens.

that indecisiveness would be taken into account in a professional screening

These words have been helpful to me. I kind of stopped worrying about it after reading this, and just started focusing on getting myself a referral and appointment. It’s ridiculously slow getting any kind of appointment through my healthcare provider (and I still haven’t seen them yet) but I appreciate not having to worry about “should I be preparing for this?” in the interim.

Excellent response. Thank you.

So the most ethical diet choice is then “buy your meat local and make sure you know your butcher is not 13” ?

Are they exploited on farms that grow feed for chickens and cattle? Because if so, I could imagine someone making an argument for “lessening” child labor with their economic choices by simply eating the grains directly.

But I do believe GDP includes government spending.

It sounds like you were distressed and left because you didn’t know what to do or how to help.

That’s empathy. Feeling uncomfortable when you see people in pain is empathy. And it’s normal. It’s normal for you to feel distressed around her as you hear her account. It’s normal to want to leave. It’s normal to feel guilty about leaving. It’s normal to wonder if you could have done more to help catch the bastard.

This is awful. What you just saw is awful. What you just experienced is legitimately uncomfortable.

And it’s hard for people to wrap their heads around, because how could your pain be valid when it’s a response to seeing someone in “real” pain? How could your pain be important when it’s nothing more than the faint echo of the pain you’re witnessing someone else go through?

But it hurts. As selfish as it feels to hurt at a time like this, it still hurts.

Wow. That’s Linus Torvalds levels of screaming, “ARE YOU FUCKING STUPID?!”

People got really worked up back in 2008.

Yeah, but Fain is the first democratically elected UAW leader (prior leadership was chosen by delegations and was fraught with racketeering and embezzlement) and it shows.

Oh no, if I think someone’s name is Joe and it turns out being Jeff, I feel atrocious.

Have you tried punching “batch recipes kale” into a search engine? (but instead of kale, put whichever vegetable you want to eat more of)

“Batch recipes” are basically like meal prep. And they often taste amazing.

My reasoning is: if you have leftovers in your fridge that are veggie-laden, tasty, and convenient, odds are you’ll be getting your veggies without even trying.

But now I live in Nevada. I will be voting for Biden because

• the CHIPS Act is going to put chip manufacturing at the mercy of union labor
  • and with the solidarity whipped up by places like Antiwork? It’s going to be a bloodbath.
• his bans on slave labor solar panel imports will do the same thing. Union laborers won’t need to compete with slave owners.
• he halted ICE worksite immigration raids, which were basically used to terrorize migrant workers and keep them complacent (hence lowering their wages, and by extension, lowering the market price of labor)
• he “played the long game” and helped win rail workers those sick days they were fighting for.
• he kept student loan payments paused for the first 33 months of his term and tried to get a decent chunk forgiven
• he appointed trust-busting advocate Lina Kahn to the FTC, where she is now a chairwoman
• he appointed pro-labor lawyer Jennifer Abruzzo to the NLRB, where she recently set an anti-union-busting precedent that, according to Harold Meyerson at Prospect.org, “makes union organizing possible again”

He’s silently, steadily, baby-stepping us in the right direction. And that’s worth a vote of support, not just a vote for a lesser evil.

I didn’t. I was in California, so my vote was irrelevant anyways. I’ve been living with my mom, so I decided to use it to make a point.

I was like, “look Mom! I don’t approve of Biden’s hair sniffing, so I’m voting for Jorgenson! You can do the same! That’s an option!”

It didn’t work. She voted for Trump. (Don’t worry. She was also in California so her vote was also irrelevant). You’d think with her personal history, she’d have been AGAINST serial sexual predators… but I guess his cult of personality was just too strong. She still genuinely believes he “stood up to the globalists.”

Do you think it’s possible for a Twitter version of this drowning-out siren to exist? What would it look like?

Thank you so much for all the information!

Damn. The old leadership – on top of being subservient – sounds like a bunch of crooks. I’m happy the UAW has its new process.