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Cake day: July 12th, 2024

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  • The SPD was joining with the right to crush workers’ movements long before the election of 1933. If the KPD had joined with them in a coalition it would have represented the KPD abandoning the German workers, and events from then on would have played out largely the same because the Social Democrats enthusiastically went after the Communists along with the Nazis, and it was once the Communists were taken out that the Nazis turned their ire towards the Social Democrats.

    The only ways Wiemar Germany turns out different is if a) the SPD joins, rather than represses, the Spartacist Uprising, or b) the KPD manages to take control before being destroyed. It isn’t about being perfect, it’s about preventing the forces of reaction from having a foothold in the movement.







  • Maybe your body is digested over a thousand years because the Sarlaac doesn’t catch very much prey so it has evolved a hyper-efficient digestive system and sits dormant most of the time, but also once you’re in Luke’s right and you’ll actually die of crushing or acid burning or dehydration.

    But they also call it “The Almighty Sarlaac”, which to me implies that this is all folk knowledge. So maybe “be digested over a thousand years” is just what Tatooinians believe will happen to anyone who falls in.









  • Hardest ones for the majority are probably landback and reparations. Less hard but still pretty hard for Americans writ large would be a big transition to public housing and mass transit, since for many Americans most of their wealth is in their house value and a huge part of their concept of freedom is in their car. Anything that threatens the suburbs - whether that’s making cities better and cheaper or increasing land taxes to better match the true cost of providing services to non-urban areas - is basically impossible to do in America as it currently exists.

    Defund the police is a hard sell outside of the minority communities that face the worst of what the police do. Reform the police is a little easier to sell to libs, but they’ve been “reforming” the police basically my whole life and the only thing that’s happened is the budget keeps going up and they keep getting more and more military vehicles.

    Less hard but still opposed by the majority is any kind of actually-effective industrial policy. For example compare how China captured 80% of the world’s solar production - by investing a trillion dollars over the past decade directly into green energy companies, some run directly by the state and some run privately in partnership with it - to our own largest green energy investments - which was smaller than our oil and gas investments in the same bill and didn’t create any kind of control over the market at all, just incentives for private businesses to possibly chase after - and it’s clear why we’re falling behind or losing our lead in basically every single sector. But propose that the US Government should take a page out of China’s book and invest directly in production and people will screech at you about how central planning doesn’t work and how the government can’t do anything right.

    It’s like this for policy after policy after policy, no matter how granular you get. Bike lanes? People think those increase traffic. Giving benefits and a minimum wage to Uber drivers? Roundly rejected. Demilitarizing the border and legalizing most of our immigrants? Keep dreaming! Just about the only progressive policy that gets widespread support is Medicare for All, and even that depends on how you word your polling question.

    IMO almost all of what I just laid out is due to a messaging deficit from progressives. We’re certainly in a better place than we used to be - I remember the 2000s when being anti-war or pro-lgbt got you sent to the American gulag - but we need more people and orgs with a national profile pushing for these issues and not immediately folding on them in the name of party unity.





  • Well, if the government is accountable to the people, then pressures from below should shape its policies. But in America as-is I suppose you’re right that there would be no reason to think that that would happen, only a proletarian democracy can truly ensure that a government is responsive to the needs and desires of the people.


  • SSJMarx@lemm.eetoMemes@lemmy.mlMeh burger
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    1 month ago

    Bar around the corner of my house is like this. I’ve never been because they’re across the street from a hole in the wall Japanese place that is really, really good, so whenever I’m walking out of my house to eat that’s where I go.