D&D now barely qualifies as math. There isn’t even any division. That said, really good at getting people to understand statistics.

Look, I get you. I just think you are making the classic blunder of assuming people are literally born prone to being angry at the new neighbor.

What I am saying is that they are not, it is an enculturated behavior, that is again, rewarded and enforced through your life in this society. All culture, including right-wing culture, is learned and shared behavior, it just seems ‘more natural’ because it is what is rewarded in this society, and most people’s are far more interested in material outcomes than anything else. That is why that person went back to believing in shit, a single day of conversation is not going to change years of learned and reinforced behavior. Otherwise talk therapists would literally be miracle workers. It takes conscious effort for some people in this society to be leftwing. Some people just are like that. Again, facts may be a shield, but they are a weak shield, they may provide solace and comfort, but they do not provide a way to power or effective negotiation with it.

You can have facts, but obsession with facts shouldn’t define you, imo focusing instead on rewarding good social behavior around you, being open to communication and trustworthy is worth more than any single fact you can offer someone. We don’t fight anti-social behavior with facts, we fight it with demonstrating the real rewards, both mentally and emotionally, of pro-social behavior. I don’t know if this is revolutionary behavior, but I do think that, and patience helps a lot.

You are wildly over-estimating the role that things like ‘appeals to emotion’ have on the right. Most people I know who are on the left are on the left because of their emotional investment into concepts such as ‘justice’. The reason the right is in control is because the controllers of the means of production monetarily rewards right-wing (including right-wing liberal obviously) behaviors and ideology. The problem is fundamentally more complex than ‘fact-checking’, ‘ceding ground’ and ‘appeals to emotion’. Thinking that these ideological methods and arguments are the base or basis for revolution is part of the liberal ideology that we swim in on a regular basis. Not that I have a better solution at this point, mind, just that I know that these things very much do not matter in the long run.

Fair enough.

They work their asses off, but not in the same way a line worker will literally work their ass off. There is a huge fucking difference, especially since finance and engineering people usually get compensated at some point (even if it isn’t within the yearly pay cycle).

Well, as the song goes, the models will have children, we’ll get a divorce, find some more models, everything must run it’s course.

Providing maximum profit for minimum services!

Not even a juicer. A small juice bag refrigerator.

I know several people who have said that this is the first election they aren’t voting in. Idk if it’s going to matter, but these are dem voters in a swing state.

I knew he was sus when Behind the Bastards was in my Spotify recommended. He is incredibly coded as manufactured dissent.

You see my values haven’t changed! I value being elected, and being your leader so much!

We will never really know, but if true, I will bet the Russians got it and this is cope. I mean as embarrassing as getting friendly fired is, it is less embarrassing than admitting that F-16s can’t hold a candle when not fighting against early 90’s Soviet tech and farmers.

Yeah this. As well as, in practice, humans tend to act first, then create ethical justification post-hoc. Even if we were able to create a totally ethical system, it would be unlikely to ever actually be applied correctly.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be attempting to create better things, or more ethical outcomes, it just means that getting bogged down in ethical arguments is pointless. To quote Parenti, I support the revolution that feeds and teaches the children.

They’ll never do it, there is way too much money bound up in the political show at this point, people who need to be paid to be kept on board would get pissed.

Yeah, every other 'working class" (media guy larping as a factory worker) complains about how ‘unethical Chinese production is’ as if American companies keep their noses clean.

I always have to point out to them, when was the last time a celebrity made a systemic change that actually lived past their death? Can you think of a single one? How has pro athletes giving turkeys out to poor neighborhoods on Thanksgiving alleviated poverty? Remember what happened to Colin Kaepernick when he presented a very mild critique of the power structure? It’s almost as if any amount of social status that is not organized within the working class is doomed to be an ephemeral moment in time, because it cannot be protected and safe guarded by labor.

Thanks for the reading materials I will follow up on it!

I guess? Gender relationships crop up all through Marx and Engels work, in many cases, substantial time is taken to understand the nature of these relations. Marx doesn’t go into gender theory because gender theory wasn’t really even a thing at the time, and wouldn’t be until developed later by students of Marxist social theory, though then thrown to the cobbles by Stalin (one of his real big fuck-ups).

Marx and Engels did concern themselves with gender relations under capitalism, in fact they wrote about it at length.

It’s been awhile, but If I remember correctly, proles have to be free citizens, because they have to be free to move to where work is. While you could theoretically have a slave that you contract out to industries, the fact that you have to make a contract with an owner means you bear a fiduciary duty to that person that you (at the time of writing) did not owe to a prole. However, contracting slave labor for factory work did not fit the model of slave-based production at the time (the Southern U.S. being the model Marx would be discussing).

Now that doesn’t mean that most proles aren’t engaged in wage slavery, but that is a fundamentally different animal than legal slavery, as the slave is not a legal ‘person’ but instead a literal commodity, the slave being the commodity rather than strictly the labor the slave provides.