ProdigalFrog @ ProdigalFrog @slrpnk.net

A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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60% of Teamsters voted for Trump in the last election. Unfortunately a tremendous number of their membership is likely only in the union for personal benefit, and do not understand whatsoever class conflict or have enough altruism to see or care about the bigger picture, and are easily exploited via culture war tactics.

Be sure to participate in any elections to replace O'Brien (I guess Richard Hooker's Fearless Slate is one of the better options? I'm not a Teamster, so you'll have to research further), and consider Dual-Carding with the IWW if you can.

Cheers for going to the effort of transcribing that!

This goes back to how Nixon exploited the Hard Hat Riot. Working class union men started to resent leftist anti-war college students due to their negative stance on veterans. The Hard Hats were motivated by a simplistic patriotism for veterans, since many of them had family in the armed forces.

Republicans saw an opportunity to exploit that cultural difference, and began to pretend to care about unions while shitting on the new left to sway the more conservative unions to switching.

Democrats enabled this shift by being neoliberal corporatists with a pinch of welfare. Corporate lobby money is too good to resist for them.

The new flavor is to appeal to racist protectionism and the conservative culture war to win over conservative unions.

60% of Teamster membership voted for Trump in the last election, making them the most susceptible to being tempted and destroyed by republicans in sheep's clothing. O'Brien is only too willing to facilitate that destruction, and ultimately will dance to whatever tune will keep him elected, which in this case is appealing to the conservative values of 60% of his base. Slugs voting for Salt.

'ol Smedley keepin' it real.

Glad you found it helpful! :)

There’s no requirement that they be unionized. Anyway, that’s unrealistic in the US.

It helps, because unions will have strike funds to supplement worker's income during the strike. Most American's have no savings and are living hand to mouth, which may discourage them from participating in a general strike.

For your second paragraph, I don't disagree. Even with the potential for that, I consider it a mostly non-violent action, at least in comparison to a civil war.

If you have a local e-waste recycling center, habitat for humanity, or similar, you should be able to find a decent laptop, which makes for a good homelab platform. A desktop with a somewhat recent CPU (Intel 6th gen at least, I would say) could also be a good option if you don't mind a bit higher idle power usage.

Otherwise, ebay is a good non-local option. If you don't need a lot of horsepower for what you'll be hosting, a complete Dell Wyse 5070 thin client can be picked up for about $40. They're super efficient little x86 machines that have an M.2 slot for an SSD and decent connectivity, and idle at around 6 watts.

If you need more power, you could step up to a retired office mini-PC. They usually draw around 10 to 12w idle from what I recall.

If you need even more power, and PCI slots, the 7th and 8th gen intel based office PC's are a bargain, like the Dell Optiplex 3050 SFF, Lenovo Thinkcentre M910s, or HP Elitedesk G3 or G4 SFF.

Ah, gotcha, so when my neighbor’s house needs to be redone because he rewired it himself, I’m on the hook for that.

I already mentioned that a community could collectively decide to continue to enforce building codes.

Too bad I have to stand by and let a couple of transient drug addicts cook meth in the house next door again

There would be much less incentive to create drugs for profit in a world without money.

Not saying there wouldn't be drugs or addicts, but it's extremely likely the scale of the problem would be fairly drastically reduced, as many people turn to becoming drug addicts due to becoming homeless as a way to find some way to cope with the extreme stress and trauma of the situation. Without money, there would be no reason for China to continue to sell fentenyl and other drugs to the cartels to be shipped into the US, and the same for Cocaine from South America. That would leave only what could be reasonably produced at home, which would likely take the form of weed.

If, on the chance that someone did start producing meth in a community that has collectively agreed to not allow for that, they could potentially be ejected from the community.

Sure thing. That’s totally going to happen. ... it fall apart into vague handwaving about how everyone will be all helpful sunshine and smiles, which we know for a fact, people aren’t that at any level of their being.

It seems that you believe people are only motivated by money, status, or power. But we have examples of societies that were able to implement an Anarchist way of existence, such as Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War, which abolished money, the state, and was able to thrive as federated communities. George Orwell went there, and spoke of how excellent that mode of society was, to the point that he fought in the war and took a bullet in the neck for it.

Except it wouldn’t be their home. Someone else built it

They could have built it themselves, too.

I watched the movie a couple nights ago for the first time. It was pretty darned good, though the interpersonal scenes with his girlfriend seemed a little forced, and may have been a fabrication of the director to add artificial drama. Or at least, that's the vibe I get from what he mentions about the movie in this trailer for a biography on him.

So the community bears the effort and cost of maintaining houses (or apartments) which they are not allowed to benefit from.

Bear in mind that the community would render aid to anyone who needs assistance in maintaining their own properties as well. It would be mutual aid. For the 'cost' of perhaps choosing to maintain a temporarily empty property, you would never need to 'purchase' a new roof, heater, or repairs for your own home. The community would help you the same way you helped them.

You're also ignoring my mention of the benefit that this mutual aid would enable others to travel to maintained community housing anywhere in the world for free.

I think we would see a significant number of people jumping from home to home, trashing each one and then moving on to the next, leaving the community with the choice of cleaning up those homes, or letting them become uninhabitable hazards, and a blight on the neighborhood.

I think you're putting a bit too much weight into the idea that the only thing keeping most housing stock in good condition is that financial barrier. I think most people would want to keep their home in good condition without financial pressures forcing them to keep it nice. If everyone let their home go into disrepair, then there would be no 'good' homes to jump to. It's in the interests of everyone to maintain good housing stock, so that if you ever did move you wouldn't only have shitholes to choose from.

If you think people would suddenly start taking care of a home just because they have one, then I’ve got a bridge to sell you, just look at all the litter and pollution people dump everywhere. Take a moment and look at cars in parking lots, and I bet you’ll find at least one that is packed to the brim with garbage, to the point of being dangerous to drive.

I'm not saying in this new way of society that everything will just become magically perfect, but I very much doubt it would be an epidemic on the scale you're thinking of. Even in your example of garbage filled cars, you don't find half the parking lot like that, only one at most. Just because a handful of people might not take care of their home doesn't mean it wasn't worth it to stop millions of people worldwide from suffering and dying on the streets, throwing themselves under busses due to hopelessness.

No, there is a financial risk and financial incentive when you own a home, or even rent an apartment. If you don’t take care of it, then you lose out on that risk.

There are millions of dilapidated homes that are owned by the people who live in them. There are thousands upon thousands of rental properties that landlords will let become unlivable and condemned. Owning a property or even having consequences does not stop that from happening.

there are zoning laws, city, state, and national laws that pertain to maintaining a home, along with certifications and inspections to make sure the dwelling is safe to inhabit.

There is nothing stopping a community from continuing to enforce those laws if they desire.

but it’s also clear that “just make housing a right and let anyone move into a house that the community has to pay for and work to maintain” is an idealistic dream that naively handwaves away reality.

"It's easier to imagine an end to the world, than to the end of capitalism."

I'd suggest looking at some more in-depth analysis instead of dismissing the concept off hand from a short comment.

For a General Strike to work, there does need to be a somewhat unified vision of what the strike is against. That means getting workers educated about the situation as much as possible.

A boycott can sometimes work against individual corporations, but a boycott to make the government listen would require sustained participation from a massive section of the population, which seems unlikely to say the least. In contrast, a general strike only needs workers in critical unionized industries to join in to cause a virtual halt of economic activity (dock workers, train workers, truckers, etc). This lowers the numbers needed to be effective by an order of magnitude, and is thus much more feasible. History has shown it to be the most effective non-violent tool we have for over 100 years, and so far nothing else has come close.

Prefiguration could be considered a 3rd method. Building the alternative systems we want to see and use in the world to lower our dependence on the current system facilitates the ability to enact general strikes, boycotts, and reduces the leverage they have over us to not enact resistance.

A fourth method would be perhaps more extreme, like collectively destroying all of the world's databases that contain financial debt records, Fightclub/Mr.Robot style. But that would require extreme coordination between established capable groups, and currently is not a feasible option.

Maybe it the family in it moved out because they only needed a quick place to stay short term after moving to a new city? Could be that it’s housing for a college student who has gone back home during summer break?

I think in most cases, short-term housing as you describe would be best served by more dense apartment complexes that are maintained by the community, and the people who stay in them for those short periods. They would be maintained in the same way that public transport or libraries would be maintained, as a public resource that everyone has access to and needs.

The benefit to those who maintain such complexes is that they would also freely have access to use such facilities in other parts of the country. This is not terribly dissimilar to how individual Native Americans were able to travel vast distances in America and expect accommodation from virtually any tribe they came across (that weren't hostile due to a larger conflict), because without such universal accommodation, each tribe would be limited in how far they could travel or trade. It was to all tribes mutual benefit to give each other that accommodation, in an early form of mutual aid (you can read more about that in David Wengrow's book, The Dawn of Everything, a very interesting read).

Maybe a nicer house opened up in the area, so the resident left their old house to go to the new one?

The Dispossessed by Ursula Le'Guin offers an interesting solution to that scenario. In that book, money does not exist, and housing is simply a right that all are entitled to. Couples and families are given larger accommodation when it becomes available, which is managed by an elected housing committee.

A single family home would be unlikely to be empty for long in a desirable area, so I don't think abandoned homes would be a significantly bigger issue than they already are under our current system. As a current example, In Japan, many smaller rural towns with dwindling populations have such an abundance of unoccupied homes, that they're actively paying people to move out to the area, and will sell the house for under $10k in the hopes someone will take them up and maintain it.

It would fall on the neighbors to maintain the house until someone else moved in to it.

Only if they wanted to. There would be no one to force them to do such a thing. They may elect to do so since they would have much more free time in a socialist world (estimates usually suggest around 3 months of community work would be required to give everyone a good standard of living, with the remainder of of the year being free time to do with as they please).

How do you think they are going to feel when some “house jumper” moves in who just lets the place fall apart and moves on to another location because it costs them nothing to let the house go to ruins and they have no personal interest in maintaining it?

How is that prevented in our current society? Many home owners let their home go into disrepair despite owning it. Sometimes this is done out of poverty, or a lack of motivation for upkeep. The only way to force someone to maintain their home in our current society is with HOA's who give fines or even jailtime to individuals if they don't. They don't have the most popular reputations.

Regardless, a community could decide to implement HOA-like rules if they all agreed to it, and then someone could decide if they wanted to live there and abide by those rules, or go somewhere where there aren't any (like our current system).

Cheers :)

I can understand feeling a bit underhanded from it, as she almost certainly wouldn't have wanted me to do any of that had I asked her.

But if the alternative was standing by to let the right-wing propaganda do its job and slowly melt her brain, morphing her into a hateful person who's so painful to be around that it might result in the need to go low or even no-contact... Feeling a little underhanded is a tradeoff I'm willing to make, personally.

My mother did not receive a good education (I recently discovered she did not know how gravity works on even the most basic level, like that the mass of the earth is what made things be pulled down), and has virtually no ability to critically investigate false claims, instead relying almost entirely on gut feeling and intuitions, which makes her particularly susceptible to harmful propaganda.

I suppose I reasoned that my parents would've tried to actively prevent me from viewing harmful material that would've turned me into a bad person when I was growing up, I'm just doing the same for her in her old age by shielding her from material specifically designed for that very thing. Not terribly unlike someone blocking Fox News stations on the TV at old-folks homes.

I tried appealing to her reason with logical arguments for years, but Fox could always offer a quicker, simpler, less nuanced counter argument that fit her pre-existing feeling or intuition, and thus any effort I put in to convince her of some truth would be rendered meaningless. Blocking it was the only thing that finally made a difference.

But perhaps the ends of removing those sources was so beneficial, that I'm now trying to rationalize resorting to those means, having my own much smaller Captain Sisko moment 😅

I don't mean regarding maintenance, I mean why are the houses empty?

I could see a very undesirable area having houses left abandoned, just as they are in our current system. But in areas that are desirable, why would a house be left abandoned for so long when everybody needs a place to live?

A group from in the community could keep track of what houses aren't being used so they could direct people needing a home toward them. Perhaps if someone is moving they could inform that group that the house in now available, and give them the keys.

This is a great doc. My own mother was becoming quite reactionary from fox news and trump speeches being recommended to her via the youtube algorithm, to the point where she started claim I had been brainwashed by the liberal media for trying to explain to her that climate change was real and advocating for helping homeless people.

When I was able to, I would try clicking the 'Not interested' or 'Don't recommend this channel' on those videos from her computer when she wasn't in the room, but it would always just recommend the same content from a different channel channel. It was almost impossible to re-train the algorithm, and all it would take is her clicking on one stray right-wing video for it to continue to recommend that stuff.

Like in the documentary, at some point she had an appointment to go somewhere and I happened to have an opportunity to access her computer for an extended amount of time.

What I did was subscribe her account to a bunch of left-wing news sources, and more critically, I installed the browser addon BlockTube, which allows you to create a blacklist that seamlessly prevents videos or channels matching any keywords you choose from displaying on youtube. I added words like Trump, Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, Fox News, Sean Hannity, etc.

Like the father in the documentary, taking those negative sources away took effect almost immediately, and now a year later, she's almost a different person. No longer so reactionary, no more pearl clutching about trans people (she still doesn't like it, but it's not perceived as a threat to society at least), and now believes climate change is real (she took a liking to PBS Terra), I was even able to convince her to install solar panels on her house!

I was lucky that she isn't tech savvy at all, so that blocking addon will never be discovered. She also wasn't deeply invested in fox news or those talk show hosts, so never noticed that they stopped showing up in her feed, nor bothered to seek them out again specifically.

If anyone else has a parent like that, I would strongly suggest trying those two tactics if you ever get the chance.

Could you elaborate what you mean?

None of what I suggested is feasible to achieve within a political framework that is ultimately captured by capital. A handful of small particularly ethical landlords may support reform, but most will not, and the bigger corporate landlords will actively fight it with millions of dollars in lobbying, which the politicians have proven time and time again they are only too willing to accept.

Edit: It will take renters standing up, creating tenant unions, and engaging in direct action to cause real change.

In a theoretical socialist society, people would not be allowed to own multiple single family homes, only the one they're currently using, since renting an essential need creates a power imbalance.

As a stop-gap, all currently rented single family homes (as in renting the entire house, not just a room in a house), could be converted to rent-to-own contracts, so that at some point that power imbalance ends and the renter is no longer being exploited.

I was able to switch myself and my family to vegetarian thanks to how good plant based meat alternatives have gotten. If you haven't yet, I highly recommend trying out Impossible meat products. Their burgers put in an air fryer are indistinguishable from real meat for me, same with their ground beef.

I've been able to cook all of my family's favorite meat based recipes with impossible meat with no changes to the recipe, and all of them, who are life-long meat eaters, tell me they can't tell a difference.