Right wingers love Sowell tho

Civility should be liberalism and they should be cheering it on to eat socialists in the second panel

Big artists are performing clowns for monopoly capitalists.

What country do you live in and how much should you be punished for living in it?

Github is basically social media but for tech nerds. Social media networks naturally monopolize, as they primarily have value because everyone else is already there. If you put your project on Github and it is popular you might get 2k “stars” and regular pull requests. If you put your project on an alternative you might get 10X less of both. So people make decisions about the trade-offs between exposure and avoiding Microsoft

The US has been punishing open source contributors from countries they don’t like.

Google Maps can, and we’re just hearing this live now, “get fucked”.

No

Biden and Dems pushed hard against immigrants and beefed up ICE.

o7

OWS and BLM did not fail due to not having a concrete and focused list of demands. That was media spin intended to undermine the movements. There was a widely circulated list (or really very similar lists) of BLM demands, around 5. In cities, a given BLM group would have very specific and actionable demands and would attempt to leverage their occupations and other disruptions to achieve them. Nobody in City Hall would have any difficulty understanding them nor the general public when reading the ubiquitous pamphlets at marches.

But this idea is almost true, because the actual reason for failure was a lack of experience in organizing effectively. Both movements were reactive and massively decentralized. They wasted huge amounts of time and energy trying to figure out what to do via large, open debate spaces without particularly good political education, agreement, nor effective means of organizing like committees and commitments to act on committees’ recommendations. And because their spaces had a low average level of political education, they were easy to coopt by any savvy group of liberals with a bullhorn, e.g. the people that told BLM protesters to talk to cops or get themselves arrested for literally no reason.

They were also vulnerable to tokenization, e.g., “listen to what the black people tell you”. Which ones? Black people aren’t a monolith! The actual reality in these spaces is, again, whoever happens to be present at the time and has a bullhorn. They might have great ideas built on life experience, planning actions, and political education, or they might be someone with a cop uncle saying it’s time to debate whether ACAB is racist or something. White liberals are particularly vulnerable to tokenizing arguments and will listen when told to go home using such arguments, which has been the death of many an occupation. Behind the scenes, POC organizers are pissed and trying to figure out who the person with the bullhorn was and how they can stop that next time - 5-10 years down the road, i.e. there is a feeling that it is essentially too late to “fix” the situation, and those organizers feel bitter.

So if we step back and ask what the core challenges were, they amount to having far too little in the way of mature organizers and other politically educated groups to lead and educate during these kinds of events. The ratio between members of mature organizations, politically educated general public, and non-politically educated general public is incompatible with effective organizing. So all that happens is ad hoc re-learning of the same lessons every organizer has learned for centuries, just too late to be used for the current event. Or worse, most people not even understanding what went wrong or that thete was a failure in the first place.

So, the solution is to build mature left organizations that use effective methodologies and prevent liberal cooption. And to do it now, not just as a reaction to every new major event. This is not an easy task but it is one with historical precedent and a half-decent roadmap. A list of demands is not really directly relevant, it is just a tool for organizers to use and must always be crafted for the conditions and political questions of the moment by such the ground groups.

Vance would be more effective in carrying out the right wing agenda.

To quibble, housing isn’t just treated as a commodity, it is treated as a financial asset that will accrue value. This nearly always leads to a massive price spiral. The same applies to university loans, for example. Once financialized, pricing spiraled even faster than the cuts to funding that were passed on to students as tuition. Health insurance and healthcare have a similar dynamic because the insurance industry is similarly non-productive and can only make larger and larger profits by basically scamming: paying out less than they promised and investing their cash reserves.

Re: a successful strike, this requires having your workers on board and ready to hold a line for each other. They have to be ready for a fight and not backstab, undercut, or balk because they are afraid. And they need to be at the table in the first place, coordinated and ready to go. This would amount to a level of organization that is currently unimaginable in the US, where false consciousness is dominant. Most importantly, whichever material forces drive people to organize will shape their demands. When forming a union, you do research first to see which workplaces are good prospects and what they care about most, then roll that into a campaign. We don’t really know what forces may build to drive people to be ready to take some kind of action, nor do we know that left organizational capacity will be what that energy ends up feeding. The false consciousness in the US that has been so effective is marginalization. Chattel slavery, genocide of indigenous people, a temporary exploitation and then rejection of Mexicans and Chinese people. A temporary exploitation and then white-ification of Irish, Eastern Europeans, Greeks, Italians. Scapegoating women, black people, gay people, trans people, and do on. This is currently a stronger tradition in the US than left organizing and it is the society the Nazis took notes from when designing their racial conquest and empire plans (though they thought the US’ racial rules were too extreme to work in their region).

The real question is not what is an idealistic list of demands to address the contradictions of US capitalism, but how we could organize from the left to win out over these fascistic tendencies (really just the dark side of liberalism qua the political ideology of capital). The path taken to organize and the historical events surrounding it will determine any hypothetical demands of a hypothetical general strike.

So, framed another way: a more appropriate question is what will those reading this thread be doing to learn how to organize, to understand capitalism and historical currents, and to join, enlarge, and improve principled anticapitalist parties and organizations that can survive and win out over left liberal cooption (like many unions suffer fron today) and right liberal reactionary violence?

Check your local anti-capitalist actions and see if anyone needs help. Trust your gut or ask here if a given organization you’re thinking of joining seems off. But get involved! May Day, as in May 1, the true day of labor, will be here soon and is a good event for seeing what anti-capitalist organizations are in your area. The lead orgs doing the work for the events of the day are a good bet.

Fun etymological fact: very long ago, tyranny used to refer to an autocratic leader that issued a debt jubilee, generally in response to a peasant uprising. A debt jubilee is where most or all debts are declared invalid, a clean debt slate for society, and was generally necessary to keep society functioning. The mini revolution that appointed the tyrant would be short-lived and the prior systen would more or less remain in place, just with cancelled debts.

Start with a non-job so you can study while working. Then get internships relevant to your major once you know your direction.

A non-job is one with a lot of downtime and where they don’t care if you read. Parking attendant, small movie theater worker, custodian at a place that is well-staffed.

The conditions under which the US could carry out a coordinated general strike would not look like the current US. And the demands would be subject to those conditions. US organized labor is largely beholden to capital and has no principled sense of solidarity, certainly beyond US borders, but often even within them. That would need to be developed through struggle and creating organization where there is little. See the federal workers getting screwed with by the administration? A very large percentage are unionized but their union is weak and poorly organized. They have simply accepted the dictates of their employer that they are not allowed to strike and therefore they have no basic infrastructure with which to organize actions or even think of themselves as workers that need to be militant and fight for one another.

Under current conditions the closest thing you will get to a general strike is popular riots. Those are expressions of social pain and frustration and they require no organizing.

It might sound like I’m not really answering the question, but that’s because the question itself is wrong. It has flipped the problem on its head, which is to say, is too focused on what ideas would be good to demand under a general strike rather than how would you ever build the conditions for a general strike? Demands must be historically embedded, they must be relevant to the groups coordinating a strike, and they need to be clear-eyed about the capital strike that would occur adjacent to it. We cannot say what those demands would be other than they would not be about this administration. The US working class will lose fights over and over again under all administrations until it can be organized and directed with concrete and correct political analysis.

Re: “restore” the United States, why? The US is a genocidal empire currently help genocide Palestinians and enabling the prelude to the Armenian Genocide 2.0. We should seek justice, not a “return”. The past and the status quo of the US are not goid things, the narrative that they were/are requires white supremacist thinking.

The NYPD’s total budget is over $10 billion. They pull from other line items for things like buildings and benefits.

The NYPD budget would make it something like the third largest military if compared to countries’ military budgets. The NYPD’s main purpose is to protect capital which, per “stop and frisk” and similarly racist policies, are intended to harass minority groups. If there is a safety issue where minutes matter, they are only hours away. If a shop window gets broken they’ll be there immediately.

I’ll add two points that may be somewhat redundant but I think are key to understanding this logic.

The first is that Americans (this is in the context of the US) are politicalky incoherent and, generally, politically illiterate. This is exaggerated in polling, as the ways in which questions are framed can drastically change the results, even if the policies are identical. If you say, transphobically, “should we protect women by ensuring biological men [sic] cannot participate in women’s sports?” they will frequently agree. If you say, “should we allow trans teenagers to participate in sports aligning with their gender?” the results might flip. And when you focus in on individuals and the impact, even more people suddenly have a pro-trans position, like when someone is banned from participation and explains how it impacted them. If we understand that Americans have basically zero political understanding and are not in the habit of critically examining their own ideas, then we can really think about what these liberals are doing when they begin suggesting triangulating to the right: rather than coherently organize for liberation, to take the politically incoherent and educate them, they are saying to cede this to the right, to allow transphobes to build transphobic consciousness instead. The polling and results mean nothing on this topic, as the public has little to no understanding and can be swayed.

The second point is to focus on tailism. In short, tailism is an epithet from the left (early uses from Lenin) that allege the left should emerge from the tail end of political economic development, which ends up meaning the movement itself should follow what is popular qua some (usually unstated) definition. Tailism is an advocacy against agitation and forming coherent lines that may seem unpopular at first, and therefore amounts to an advocacy for absorbing reactionary thoughy into your organization, as you are, per tailist thinking, merely meant to be a reflection of the working class rather than thoughtnct and strategic political tendency advancing a cause. While the Democratic Party is thoroughly capitalist, imperialist, and primarily reactionary, these “centrists” (embarrassed reactionaries) are engaging in tailism in their own liberal microcosm. In this view, politics is not a struggle for a political project, like trans liberation, but an attempt to “win” to fight “the enemy” by adopting supposedly right wing “popular” views that are often not even popular. This may seem inconsistent, because on one hand the tailist is trying to triangulate what is popular but on the other is often very wrong about what is popular, but this is because they are fundamentally just looking to rationalize their push for reactionary positions, in this case transphobia. They are reacting to the left and their advocacy for trans rights and attempting to pin blame for “centrists”’ failures onto the marginalized and their advocates. Put simply, they want to punch left and move right. Not coincidentally, their material interests align rightward with capital.

For academia I recommend having an IT cost center responsible for the hosting infrastructure, namely virtualization. Then let people have VPSes (or similar) as needed to run docker-based services. This makes it easier to handle network and security concerns. Most large universities already offer something like this to students and faculty.