Shower wasn’t draining well so I pulled up the grate and a strand of gunk about a foot long and the width of the pipe came up with it. Absolutely nasty.

It’s crazy how bad doctors are allowed to be at their jobs. I know a lot of it is systemic to the US’ hyper-decentralized market driven triaged medical system but basically everyone I know has a story about a doctor who just totally ignored them, got a diagnosis wrong, or made a serious surgical mistake. Unless they cause you serious physical harm and you win a lawsuit against them there’s really no repurcussions for mistreatment.

I understand people make mistakes but the fact that it’s so prevelant in medicine, one of the few jobs that really doesn’t have room for mistakes, is absurd.

It’s crazy how good having two consecutive days off is. This will probably end for me next month though and I’m dreading it.

Israelis, famous for being very inclusive of all identities and definitely not hating everyone that isn’t a white-ish Jew with genocidal rage.

Haha I did the same thing when I first went vegan. That first summer I froze this terrible mash of dark chocolate, banana, and soy milk in a desperate attempt to replicate ice cream. It tasted good but was hard as a rock.

So Delicious was sort of a pioneer in the field but I think they’re kind of lagging behind in terms of quality nowadays. A lot of the major brands make plant based options now but grocers usually still have a pretty limited selection. Mix in style ice creams that are very sweet and have a lot of extra stuff in them seem to be easier to replicate than single plain flavors but anything that is oat or cashew based should taste pretty good. Coconut and almond milk products freeze too hard in my opinion.

Also nowadays you can get a half decent plant based version of just about anything if you look hard enough and you can afford it.

I mean it’s underdeveloped and common. It’s a vague anti-war sentiment without real material analysis of the conflicts and the contradictions underneath them that pervades the masses. As the last half-century has shown us, it’s paper thin for most Americans and they can be turned into bloodthirsty (or at least indifferent) imperialists with ease as long as they won’t personally end up in the line of fire.

Actual worker organizing (that transcends the confines set by labor law and the big unions) driven by the left organizations is the only thing that will build a working class that can learn how to fight. Why would we think workers will seriously confront capital and the state when they won’t even confront their boss? Performative International Workers Day “strikes” will not achieve this, only actual organizing.

I’ve been wanting to write something about how the US left has a deeply embedded Trotskyist current of opportunism that in our current moment has latched onto a vulgar anti-imperialism and this is one characteristic of that.

I think it’s got a lot to do with how people treat service workers and inversely how service workers (especially young female service workers) are taught to see themselves too. There’s a reason all these incidents happened at restaurants and grocery stores and not other worksites.

It’s a bit of a digression but I was recently discussing the state of labor relations in the US with someone and in every single workplace it’s basically devolved into management just refusing to ever admit any wrongdoing. Even in nonprofit institutions with long standing contracts you’ll have ice cold HR people who won’t give an inch on blatant violations until there’s a credible threat of labor action or arbitration. Also US labor law either implicitly or explicitly requires management and labor to cooperate so management is usually just flagrantly violating the law.

Capital has figured out they don’t have to offer the carrot anymore and they certainly don’t have to apologize. It’s just the stick now. Until the masses figure that out we’re fucked.

Social security and Medicare are the only things keeping the lifespan above 70 and basically the only hope even wealthier people have of retiring.

I kinda thought the tax credit rollbacks of the ACA would freak more people out but I guess that speaks to how narrow a population they actually were available to. If they got rid of the pre-existing conditions clause that might lead to some chaos though.

Andrea Laflamme

She still seems kinda liberal but I’m pretty confident that she’s never murdered any Iraqis.

Also it should be incredibly shameful that the state AFL-CIO and the SEIU local didn’t get behind their own member running for office.

There’s actually a woman running in this race who doesn’t seem half bad but the Bernie people threw everything behind Platner because he’s a troop.

Also the mined gold supply is tightly controlled by a cartel who artificially restricts the supply to keep prices high and mines all it’s gold with what are basically slaves.

I work retail but I’m mostly in back of house and don’t interact with customers very often. Retail workers are so bizarre to me. They get paid and treated like shit but sometimes they care so deeply about their job even though there’s zero reason to do so. So many of my coworkers will, in the same setting, say they just come in for a paycheck and also complain about the unprofitable mismanagement of a department (oftentimes not even their own department!). I have one coworker who was complaining about being disciplined for not taking his mandated lunch break even though there’s absolutely no pressure to skip it. Another one freaked out about the box a product arrived in being possibly incorrectly labeled (it actually was labeled correctly). If I tell any of these people we should organize a union for better pay and benefits they look at me like I have a second head but then they act like this and I’m like “you’re all desperate for communism and you don’t even know it”.

I don’t have too many complaints otherwise. It’s a little boring this time of year but I’d rather that then super busy.

I don’t think it’s out of line with the ideas of Marx or Engels. Kautsky wrote it in 1892 after spending like a decade learning from Engels so it’s well before he began drifting away from Marxism and it’s about the Erfurt program which Lenin admired. It’s not a ground breaking work of theory that will enlighten even a half decently read Marxist but like I said it describes a society much closer to our own than the Manifesto does which would probably be useful to anyone looking for entry level texts.

If it kept up with its peak it probably would be more than $30/hour by 2030 but it does make a good slogan.

I’m reading The Class Struggle by Kautsky and it’s like an updated Communist Manifesto. It’s still 130 years old but it feels so much more contemporary than the Manifesto. I think it might be better suited for entry level Marxist literature.

Imo the best thing you could try to do is organize a union or something along those lines. Maybe your local orgs know a place that needs a salt. Most of the political parties in this country don’t have any idea what they’re doing because they aren’t actually rooted in the working class. They have no organized base of workers to lead in struggle against the system which means the parties don’t actually learn anything. This leads to meaningless debates and continually rereading and misinterpreting theory.

Also forget everything you know about unions and read about “direct join unions” or “solidarity unions” because that’s the only way you’ll ever organize a union that will further the cause of socialism and it might be the only type of union there is in the coming years.

In an old eco-monkeywrenching pamphlet I read it said they used to leave notes saying they spiked trees even though they had not actually done it. The fact that they could have done it was enough to stall cutting and make the loggers look for spikes.

I’d think if the characters in your story could sabotage a few things on the site they could use that strategy as a multiplier which might also help to avoid people getting hurt.