You’re right that interrupting shipping along this route would be much harder than closing the Suez, but the U.S. still has carriers and submarines, so it could act alone without any of those nearby countries you mentioned.
In my mind, the big shift here is (1) cost and (2) forcing a longer route now means you have to shoot at boats, you can’t just refuse them entry to a canal. It would mean a much larger escalation.
The former group isn’t negatively impacted by patsocs because the former group aren’t fucking stupid, and the latter group will never engage with you or anyone seriously no matter what you do
This is good to keep in mind, but I think you can still say Patsoc types hurt the cause. The problem is most people who are exposed to their stuff don’t engage with anyone about it, so there’s no opportunity to have the sort of discussion you describe (where you can reach the reachable, and the unreachable respond predictably).
A bunch of reachable people get turned off by this/get misinformed about socialism by it, and then we never hear from them (and get to explain what this shit is and why it’s bad) because they don’t talk to anyone about it the way most people don’t talk to anyone about stuff they read online.
With this election and with Allende, there are two separate-but-related questions:
Allende succeeding at #1 but failing at #2 does not mean every party that succeeds at #1 must fail at #2. It’s a question worth asking, but we have basically one data point.
“You can say anything about China and people just buy it” is a good one. Doesn’t push too hard right away, doesn’t invite any easy lib talking points in response, and is obviously true enough to get anyone who would ever be receptive to at least pause and think a little.
How long could you pay your rent and other bare necessity bills if you lost your job? How long would it take you to find a new job with comparable pay?
If the answer to the last question is more than the answer to the first, I’d say you’re housing insecure.
ai art is art because people are mad about it.
Most persuasive point here haha
Also seems useful to separate the economic impacts of AI art (on artists, on the environment, etc.) and larger criticisms of how AI is currently used (destroying the usefulness of search engines) from the question of whether AI art has artistic value.
The point I bring up is that the peace terms are just going to get worse. The only way Ukraine turns this around is expanding this into a great power war, which is insanity, especially in the age of nuclear weapons.
Of the 31 Abrams tanks the U.S. sent to Ukraine
At $10 million apiece, tanks like the Abrams are not easily replaced.
They’re missing what makes these hard to replace. It’s not the sticker price – “just” 1 billion could buy you 1000. It’s that the U.S. currently lacks the production capacity to quickly manufacture replacements.
Unintentionally a great demonstration of the “industrial capital vs. finance capital” conflict in this war.
Survivorship bias
The financial industry is heavily regulated by the US Gov’t
Lol
Not just a time invesent – if you’re biking 18 miles you’re going to need a shower where you’re going, or you’re going to need a job where you can show up drenched in sweat.
And that’s not factoring in rain or snow or having to transport large objects or people.
The response here to “people must be financially illiterate if they can’t live without income for months!” is no, they aren’t illiterate, they live in an economy designed to keep a ton of people in precarity.
Everyone understands it’s nice to have some money set aside for rainy days. It’s such a simple lesson that calling it “financial literacy” is almost condescending. The problem isn’t that people haven’t heard of saving, it’s that decent-paying jobs aren’t common, basic costs like housing and healthcare are rising rapidly, and even if you do everything right there are a thousand ways to get a fat bill dropped on your lap that takes you back to square one.
The people we need to think about bringing left are people who will take what we say in good faith, but who are still skeptical of it. If they won’t take it in good faith, we’re wasting time talking to them. If they aren’t skeptical, they’re already convinced.
When you’re skeptical but actually willing to look into something, exaggerations or omissions can turn you away entirely. Everyone has a threshold where they say “I can’t trust this person/source anymore, I’m going to tune out what they say even if parts of it might be true.” It takes effort to sift through bad information, and why would they bother? You’re not reliable.
There is so much horrific stuff capitalists have done that we can stick to what’s indisputably true, and that doesn’t really have any gray areas or excuses, and convince those people who can be convinced.
It’s a little different when much of that net worth is tied up in your house. You can leverage that for cash to an extent, but you can’t simply subside on it for decades the way you could $800k in the bank.
But the larger point remains regardless of where exactly the line is drawn: “wealthy” in global terms includes people in developed countries who are not multimillionaires. These people have massively outsized carbon footprints, even if they aren’t as damaging as people and organizations far wealthier than they are. It’s fair to expect them to cut back on things like air travel and meat consumption.
Over/under on number of questions about Palestine is 0.5, I’m slamming that under
Many countries had periodic famines in their pre-industrial histories. China had plenty before the PRC, and the Russian Empire had some, too. Agricultural production can be thought of as a machine that would occasionally break down.
If you are given responsibility of a machine that occasionally breaks down, the machine breaks down once soon after you take over, and then never ever again, you fixed the machine.
On the corruption point: corruption is possible in any organization. It’s a concern, but there’s nothing about unions that make them more prone to it than anything else.
It’s even worse than that – there hasn’t been a genuinely open Democratic Primary since 2008.
The second step was the law the country passed at the beginning of May—the one that The Publica makes sound like a horrifying, dystopian mess. In fact, the measure had the support of the Belgian sex workers union…
But the law also explicitly protects the right to refuse specific customers, sex acts, etc.
It stipulates that “every sex worker has the right to refuse a client,” that “every sex worker has the right to refuse a sexual act,” and that “every sex worker has the right to interrupt a sexual act at any time.” It also says that “any sex worker has the right to perform a sexual act in the manner they wish” and that “if there are dangers to the sex worker’s safety, the sex worker may refuse to sit behind a window or advertise.”…
“If a sex worker exercises the right to refuse more than ten times in a six-month period, the sex worker or the employer may seek the intervention of a governmental mediation service,” according to UTSOPI. “That service will assess if there is anything wrong with the working conditions, if there is a problem in the employer-employee relationship. The service can also offer professional reorientation possibilities.”
I don’t trust Reason’s reporting on this very much, and the article is full of libertarian junk. I’m curious as to why the sex workers’ union supported this, though. Maybe they think the protections it includes are sufficient. Like 100 other things, it’ll come down to how it’s enforced.
There are a lot more lurkers on any forum than active members who comment. Everyone here has read a thousand more posts/comments than they’ve made. Getting lurkers to consider what you say is a very real thing, and people do change their political beliefs based on what they read online.