You gotta stop with the bad straw mans. I never said he was a friend to the left, I said that he easily could have been if he just kept his mouth shut and stayed out of the public's eye. I've been pointing out the hypocrisy from the left who obsesses over Musk, a guy who invests in genuinely useful things, while we have casino billionaires spending millions on Trump rallies that the average leftist never even heard of. He invests in technologies that ARE useful to the left and that's something that would be disingenuous to ignore. He's still a douche, but he's useful and far less awful than most of the other billionaires.Yeah, you're 100% right, and if you tried to say any of these ghouls are friends to leftists it would be just as ridiculous as saying Musk is. But you didn't, so bringing them up is a bit of a non-sequitur, isn't it? Nobody said Elon Musk was singlely and uniquely the most evil human being on earth, only that he wasn't a friend to leftism and an attempt to portray him as such is a pretty transparent attempt to rehabilitate his image that doesn't actually benefit the left in anyway. Any benefit that comes from Musk investing in electric cars doesn't hinge on leftists considering him a good person or an ally or whatever.
If Musk didn't have a social media presence we probably would just lump him in with Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, maybe Warren Buffet. Instead Musk ruined it by talking, but that doesn't change the fact that the specific obsessive hatred of Musk is mostly media driven, and has very little to do with the quality of what he does especially compared to shit people like the guy known as "The King of Coal". Everyone knows Musk's name, why aren't you talking about Miriam Adelson, Low Tuck Kwong, or the Waltons? They've all done far less for humanity, and have done significantly more damage. Could it be, maybe, that you got caught up in the media blitz of a celebrity billionaire? Stop obsessing over him and maybe we'll stop hearing about him buying a tiny house or eating at mcdonalds or whatever every other day.
Yeah voting works pretty well. If you don't think so go grab some friends and flaming whiskey bottles and see what you can accomplish. Probably not much, because the vast majority of people aren't blindly convinced that there is no other way out.Ah yes, electoralism. It's just like praying; it works, except when it doesn't, and if it doesn't work it's because you didn't vote hard enough. Oh and you're also trusting some kind of supreme power to interpret and act upon your wishes.
Biden was elected on promises of fighting climate change. After some negotiating he passed a 740 billion dollar package that tackled things such as the climate, deficit, and healthcare issues. It's paid for by increasing taxes on corporations, including a 15% minimum tax so places like Amazon can't get by paying 0% as well as closing some tax loopholes used by the wealthy and investments into the IRS to go after tax fraud. Included on the bill are financial incentives to build clean energy production, tax credits for wind and solar, tax breaks for buying electric vehicles, and was predicted to cut greenhouse emissions by 40% by 2030. If you want an EV, seems like it might be a good time to think about it.To highlight a single example among many, more than two-thirds of the U.S. population believes that climate change is a serious problem and the government isn't doing enough about it. Ignoring how that means an entire third of the population is politically and scientifically illiterate, does that not highlight a clear failure in the electoral system? Is the point of a representative democracy not to represent the will of the people? I'd genuinely be curious to hear how you reconcile this.
Get like ten more Democrats in Congress to overpower the filibuster and maybe we might even get a livable Federal wage!
Well we just spent 740 billion doing some pretty good things so I'd like some citations here on what you're talking about. The Democrats have publicly opposed all those things you just said and often attempted to repeal or ban them (Biden's attempted voting law comes to mind) but get shot down by a few votes from Republicans.Once you do, maybe we can move on to the billions of dollars spent on propaganda and misinformation campaigns, or gerrymandering, or the electoral college, or all the other systems put in place to subvert democracy in this country and ensure that policy represents the will of the bourg- uh, rich people, not the will of the general population.
So you know what, I'm going to say that voting does work and while US politics right now make the federal government relatively deadlocked the next few years look pretty promising.
Socialism as defined by Oxford isYeah, I guess you missed the part where I said "revolutionary unionism". Popular support for unions hasn't been stronger in the US since the turn of the century, and that's despite decades of anti-union propaganda and legislation and neoliberal indoctrination. Also it really doesn't bother me what percentage of people have a favorable view of socialism; I can promise you that neither 57% nor even 36% of Americans can even accurately define socialism. Come to think of it, I'm still not convinced you can accurately define socialism.
"A political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole."
I guarantee you when the vast majority of Americans talk about that they are almost always running off their own definition. In American politics usually it's to talk about Democratic Socialism. When Republicans mention it they usually just start yelling about Commies. Generally I'd take a guess that most of that 36% is closer to the Bernie Sanders style "higher wages with healthcare and maybe even less student debt". It's an unfortunate word that gets manipulated by both sides and is almost never used by its actual definition.
Probably because if you go as far as to "make some good points" it all gets shut down by "why did all the socialist nations fail" followed by "communism bad".It turns out if you explain socialist (and even communist, Marxist, and anarchist) principles in terms that avoid using explicitly ideological language (like the b-word lol), most people tend to agree with it. I'm not above ditching the trappings of leftist language if it means getting leftist policy enacted and when I'm talking with random people in my day-to-day life I make an effort to avoid using said language. I have no such concerns here; this is an expressly political thread after all.
Oh and if you really don't like the term bourgeoisie you can just substitute it for like... "capital interests" or "CEOs and business owners" or... "rich people". Close enough that it still gets the point across even if you're the kind of flat-Earth tier evidence denier who doesn't believe in class struggle.
I'm not going to get into the back and forth here of economics because 1) I'm really lazy and 2) despite my posts I actually don't oppose a lot of what you said, I just think it's absolutely unrealistic to expect major support in the US for actual, legitimate Socialism. You aren't the first person to have tried. There's been an extreme minority of socialists in the US practically forever.
Average 1 BR apt in California is around 1,000 per month, 1,200 if you get a 2BR with a roommate, much less if you 1BR with a significant other. Studio is even less. While this is far from "comfortable" it's something that could be done on 15 per hour and it's more or less in line with most US states. California is big and not all of it is "4k per month Los Angeles" expensive. Wages in the US are still too low, but don't laugh about this. It's great news for millions of people. However like in most areas "minimum wage" is a fantasy, jobs pay more. Google California McDonalds job openings. You're looking at 17-20 per hour.But yay for California. It would be nice if you could afford rent anywhere in the state working a full-time job at $15/hr, but steps in the right direction are nice, small as they may be.
Connecticut, Washington, and Mass also both have 15+ an hour min wage while 9 other states have 13+ an hour while 31 states have minimum wage laws higher than Federal. Why are you talking down on this, the point is if you can't do it Federally do it at the state level. There's almost nothing that doesn't violate Federal law that you can't just do yourself.
Yes that's literally exactly how mass media works.don't the leftist knows algorhythms will keep promoting musk content because of how much they are obsessed??
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