Censorship is not the same thing as propaganda. They often go hand in hand, but the US prefers to drown dissenting voices in billions of dollars worth of media. No other country has a propaganda budget the size of Hollywood’s, for example.

That’s basically what I meant. I support the Iranian people, their war of defense, and their general stance against Western Imperialism.

That doesn’t mean I think the Iranian state are the good guys though. Some elements are doing good in the world, but it’s also a horribly repressive theocratic regime. Of course, on the list of oppressive regimes, Iran ranks far below the likes of Israel and the USA…

Honestly, comrade, I agree with you. I’m just trying to create some space for the large amount of people who would be turned away by a Stalin quote to join the left in supporting Iran’s side in this. They don’t care about the broader fight against US imperialism, but they hate how bad this war looks for America (and how expensive it is).

I agree that is how the Dream is sold, but the reality of capitalism is that it is founded on exploitation. One person can rise above others because the system is pushing them down. And in order to justify that inequality, we have the ideology of American Individualism, which says to always take care of “number one” first. So people who are born into privilege get told that they deserve it, and that people who don’t have it are undeserving because of some moral failure.

The very system breeds the ideologies of selfishness. It doesn’t matter if some Americans are different, on a societal level, we are crazily selfish.

America is the most propagandized place in the history of humanity. The stranglehold that capitalists hold over American worldviews begins in public schools and is constantly reinforced through media.

I honestly don’t believe Americans can think about the rest of the world until either capitalism is dismantled and the propaganda machine destroyed, or they lose a world war and are made to change.

Or maybe you don’t choose the sides that are running the war (eg USA vs. Iran), but instead choose the side that is fighting it (the working class) against the side that instigated it (the global billionaires who benefit from imperialism and capitalism).

The party doesn’t offer good candidates in primaries, either. The only people I’ve found actually worthy of my vote have been from the DSA, PSL, or Greens. This is why the Dems will never support ranked choice voting, it totally destroys their ability to siphon political power from the left.

What language is that?

Or maybe, instead of creating privacy-infringing laws or blaming parents, we actually dismantle the tech companies who created them and imprison their leaders. We all know corporate social media is cancer, that’s why we’re on Lemmy. So let’s fucking do something about the cancer instead targeting the victims or worse, exploiting the situation to expand the surveillance state.

Honestly I doubt that Democrats would move for prosecution. This is the party of Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. There’s no way they want consequences for a member of their own class.

Now, if Trump were a leftist and breaking norms to the benefit of the working class, he’d already be executed.

SMART Recovery is a science-based alternative that uses Cognitive Behavior Therapy techniques. I don’t know what their success rate is, but people I know have been helped by their programs.

It’s more like the constitution was written by wealthy landowners for wealthy landowners, and the idea of the common people being able to hold the rich to account was downright undesirable, so it wasn’t encoded into law.

Pahlanuik has a certain way of planting images in your brain that stay there for decades. Such a weird, brilliant, fascinating and slightly off-putting author. He really captures the ennui, alienation, despair, and absurdity of late-stage capitalism.

It’s not just foreign. Internal capitalists also wish to destabilize nation states. There’s a popular fad among the global bourgeois to believe that humanity should be sliced into corporate fiefdoms with zero state control. There’s another popular bourgeois fad which is to believe that humanity’s population must be brought radically lower to reduce the risk to themselves from large numbers of people angry at being dispossessed by climate change and AI.

These two fads combined are personified in people like Trump, Musk, Bezos, Thiel, Zuckerberg, etc, and they are extremely dangerous to our species.

Harry Potter was a global phenomenon. Never before in history had a book series held such sway over a large portion of an entire generation of humans. Something like that is going to continue to have a place in popular discourse, largely because the average person is either ignorant of the issue or simply doesn’t care.

Also, in capitalism a moneymaker like HP simply isn’t allowed to die.

Because JK Rowling is pissed that the original cast doesn’t support her becoming a raging transphobe/capitalist goon.

There’s a difference between lone individuals tearing out stop signs and a neighborhood collectively deciding to install one near a park.

• The sample size is stupid small, so it’s a bit dicey to draw definitive conclusions.

This is the part that always gets me when leftists do infighting. Like, guys, we’ve only been doing this socialism thing for like 125 years and there’s only been a handful of projects that even successfully overthrew the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie themselves took 200-300 years to overthrow feudalism and had many failures and committed awful atrocities along the way.

Let’s learn from our mistakes and stop being so puritanical with our ideologies. None of us have any idea what socialism will look like when it is finally successful, the most we can do is just keep working to put power in the hands of the people, whatever form that takes.

Sounds a lot like a bunch of small states to me.

A guy drove by my local protest with a thumbs down and I got to call him a pedophile protector, which was very cathartic for me. I probably don’t need to do any more political action until the election now. /s

To be more optimistic, and entirely anecdotal, it was the largest protest in my town by far and there were many more young people present. The resistance is growing, and becoming more diverse.

Americans, even the ones who engage with the election cycle, have been politically sedentary since the civil rights movement in the 60s/70s. It takes some time and effort to wake people up to the fact that human rights are bought and continually paid for with blood, sweat, and tears. These protests are doing that. Single protests don’t solve problems on their own, but they are a necessary step to finding the solution. Take comfort that they continue to grow.

Putting fees on early withdrawals actually disincentivizes people from using 401ks or Roth IRAs. I’ve been unemployed for 3 of the last 5 years and I know that I will not be investing in retirement accounts until I have several years of steady employment under my belt, simply because I know I may need that money. The job market simply isn’t stable enough for me to even think about parking my money somewhere I can’t access it. I know I’m not alone.

I get what you’re saying but they should at least allow you to withdraw if you become unemployed.