It wasn’t even a rule, but somehow I got lunch detention for losing a copy of The Two Towers with my name written in the front and not realizing they’d found it and had it in the lost and found. This was the same middle school that only had windows in the science classrooms (because that was legally required).

There are going to be multiple factors in any international relations situation. I’m sorry you don’t understand that.

Please point out where I called you a fascist, or stop pretending you’re being persecuted.

Fiefs.

First, left and right are relative terms. We are currently in a fight for survival. If you want to die on the hill of your purity test, you’re welcome to. I’ll collect allies, people who may have the right values but incomplete information, and do what I can, and we’ll see which approach is more effective for the people, the workers.

Then I’m happy to be wrong (fewer Nazi sympathizers is always better), and you have nothing to worry about. But that you consider a potentially over-broad definition of Nazism a major problem in this political climate suggests that even if you are antifascist, your priorities are skewed.

You mean besides the decades the US and USSR didn’t blow the entire world to pieces or even enter direct conflict, which would likely have killed millions more than the proxy wars that occurred with diplomatic intervention? I’m sorry, I just can’t take anyone who truly thinks that diplomacy is always useless seriously. It strongly suggests they’ve never read a history book.

Western MD, upstate NY, somewhere in Illinois that’s not Chicago, western Oregon that’s not Portland…just off the top of my head. Those are all decent places in terms of long-term climate change issues, as well. Basically, pick a blue state, go to a red rural part. Blue state laws, red state prices. I’d be careful long-term considering Michigan and Virginia safely blue, as well.

Uncle Iroh?

If you’re worried people will think you’re a Nazi, maybe it’s not the other people you should be worried about.

A good chunk of the left (not the Dems, the actual left) understands the US legal system. It’s just that it’s hard to win in a pay-to-play system when everyone who can pay is against you.

Diplomacy is like an oxygen supply: You only notice it when it fails. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t generally work.

If you think Karl Marx was an idiot (not just wrong, but an idiot), you don’t understand the conversation well enough to participate.

Yes. That makes you a leftist. Center-leftist, but in this political climate…good enough.

Given that the corporations own the politicians who make the laws that structure our lives and allow planned obsolescence and a lack of transparency in things like phones, still going to put 90% of the blame on the rich here. Your perspective might be correct in a functional democracy, but that’s not where most people (nor even most Westerners) live.

Only a small percentage of socialists (albeit larger in this instance) hold the USSR up as anything but an example of an early, ham-fisted attempt at socialism with a lot of mistakes. If there have been no places socialism has worked yet (debatable, but I’ll argue from this position), that disproves nothing. The first several hundred tries at the lightbulb were probably failures, too, but capitalists talk about that failure as a side effect of innovation without realizing that social systems might need innovation too. I’m sorry if you suffered under an authoritarian socialist government; there’s nothing inherent about the connection between those two characteristics. But authoritarian governments tend to survive better against the kinds of conspiracies and attacks established capitalist governments launch against socialist ones, so you get to see what’s left. (If you don’t know about this, go to a library, start with…maybe Allende in ‘73…It’s very well-documented.). In sum, it has nothing to do with not caring about people harmed by authoritarianism. It has to do with seeing the evils of the system around us and refusing to accept that this is the best humanity can do. I’m sorry you can’t see that. But I’m not letting my friends’ access to insulin sit in the greedy hands of insurance companies without a fight. I’m not living in a pay-to-play political system where donors’ interests matter more than voters’ my whole life if I have anything to say about it. Regardless of your beliefs.

That and the cancerous need for infinite growth on a finite planet, which is destroying our home…

In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.

Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.

If they provide a service(an easy-to use, legal platform) in a capitalist system they didn’t create, I can’t get mad at that. What’s fucking stupid are their assumptions about inelasticity of demand. People have free choices, and if you make the paid choice sufficiently onerous, you’ll lose customers. Natural consequences.