Poor people can’t afford to lend money when they’re struggling just to eat and make rent. It’s not a viable way for them to “keep up” with inflation.

But in a sense you’re right: inflation (by itself) isn’t the problem. The problem is that wages don’t keep up with it. Because the labor movement has been failing not only to make gains, but to prevent failures (e.g. keep our effective wages from going down). Most forms of capitalist passive income keep up with inflation by design, which is no accident.

Generally you should do what:

1. Maximizes your personal well-being (though note I’m not saying “wealth”, because they two are not always the same), and
2. Satisfies your personal and ideological principles as well as possible, at least to the point where you can live with yourself.

Just because we have systemic critiques doesn’t mean we should go live in a cave and eat bugs. To the degree possible we should prefigure the society we want to build, but torturing ourselves individually to do it is both unproductive and likely takes away from our focus on more important things like organizing and taking direct action that impacts the system. We do tend to make personal sacrifices to further our ideological goals, but there’s both a practical limit and one where we shouldn’t be cruel to each other in our expectations.

Many of us are vegans. Most of us probably avoid buying shares in oil companies. But all of our circumstances are different. Perhaps people salting Chevron to radicalize union organizing there will wind up with its stocks in their retirement accounts that are difficult to divest from without harming their ability to retire, due to their particular circumstances. It seems pretty shitty to expect someone to just get rid of them without us having some kind of dependable (e.g. mutual aid) infrastructure in place to take care of each other in our old age.

TL;Dr: Yet you participate in society. Curious!

As for environment, the US nuked themselves over a thousand times, mostly on the Nevada desert. People in the 1950s used to go to Las Vegas to watch the explosions, nowadays they still go for the casinos, and that’s after many of the old dirtier bombs got exploded above ground…

The US honed that skill by turning nukes into a tourist attraction for its own citizens over 60 years ago.

Here you go, you revisionist, gaslighting piece of shit:

The partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

The fallout from atmospheric tests created a global health crisis. A 1961 study revealed that strontium-90, a radioactive isotope, was building up in the teeth of children living in the St. Louis, Missouri area, hundreds of miles away from the nearest nuclear test site in the Nevada desert. Efforts by thousands of scientists and the international public raised the alarm about contamination from atmospheric nuclear tests and urged global leaders to act.

By 1963, the international community had negotiated the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits carrying out nuclear tests in any environment that would allow radioactive material to spread across a country’s borders, including atmospheric tests, underwater tests, and tests in outer space.

The Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty dramatically reduced and eventually ended atmospheric nuclear testing. But nuclear testing did not slow down. Instead, countries with nuclear weapons shifted to underground test sites.

Just because a particular city nearby didn’t suffer the effects of fallout doesn’t mean it was under control and didn’t have horrific effects on people literally hundreds of miles away. You are literally just spewing “clean nukes” propaganda straight out of the playbook of the U.S. arms industry. Go fuck yourself.

Nah, dude. There’s plenty to disagree with in the parts of this message and your other reply down below where you try to imply modern nuclear weapons are clean and pose little to no risk beyond that of conventional weapons. Gaslight all you like, but your words are right there for all to see (unless suddenly they gain an edit timestamp after that of this comment, of course…).

This is a terrible take by someone who has heard plenty of propaganda by the arms industry but knows absolutely nothing about physics. Many of the products of the primary and even secondary nuclear reactions from a nuclear warhead are themselves radioactive and have long enough half-lives to do tons of damage in both the short and long terms. Whether or not there is radioactive material spread around is not simply a question of whether some of the original fuel remains unspent.

If all you’re doing is spreading war propaganda, log off and go rethink your life.

EDIT: Folks, start here and read other materials by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Don’t let this bullshit whitewashing of the dangers of nuclear weapons, their use, and their testing go unaddressed. And speak up against this kind of propaganda showing up in our communities—especially leftist ones.

Freedom of speech and assembly clearly in action, here. Wow. Imagine a court figuring it could tell a union not to decide its stance on something. Fascist state.

They killed over 1000 innocent people in their latest attack, raped a bunch of people, and kidnapped people, including foreign nationals.

Turns out probably not. You should really stop believing Israeli propaganda at face value. A thousand or so people were killed, yes. Many of who were Israeli militants, and many more definitely settlers and not “innocents”. Some were definitely killed by Palestinian militants (some of whom were Hamas members) during the prison break. But many were killed by IDF and Israeli police, who didn’t care who got caught in the crossfire and literally shot Israeli homes with Israelis sheltering inside using tanks. And also literally did air raids on their own military facilities, where IDF soldiers were defending themselves until being killed by their own friendly (missile) fire. And reports of rape during that particular incident have, so far at least, been debunked.

This might, at least, be a bare start to actually educating yourself (though its clear from the sense of your participation here that that is not a priority for you): A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack

Anyway, Hamas good/bad is a distraction from basically everything. It’s irrelevant when there’s millions of people who have no choice but to engage in violent struggle against their oppressors or be (with more or less speed) genocided.

Their stated goal is the complete destruction of Israel and the Jews

Destruction of the apartheid state of Israel, yes. Not of Jews. You should pay more attention. And destruction of states is good. Destruction of colonialist states is even better. And destruction of apartheid states is an absolute necessity. That doesn’t make other aspects of Hamas good, necessarily, but the destruction of Israel is most definitely not a point against them. Israel must, indeed, be destroyed.

Someone get this Zionist fucker out of here, eh?

Yeah, pretty much. The president has enormous power, and that power is even greater outside the country’s borders. Especially because of things like the “Authorization to Use Military Force” which gives him pretty much carte blanche to “fight terrorism” anytime and anywhere he likes.

There’s also this general process by which the president historically just does what he wants, and the rest of the government shrugs its shoulders and rolls over, and thus his office essentially just has that de facto power, no matter what the constitution or other laws say: Renegade Cut: No More Presidents.

The U.S. president is more powerful than any empire in the world has ever been, is pretty much a king, and basically does what he wants. Liberals often make excuses about how his hands are tied. It would be great if that were the case, but it’s really, really not.

Where the heck is the notion that the U.S. government’s hands are tied coming from?

At least part of the claim is that the president himself has little power. It’s the stupid finger-pointing game. “Biden needs Congress’ permission to do anything at all, ever.” 🙄

A useful excuse when the president doesn’t want to do anything. Falls flat on its face when he actually wants to bomb, shoot, or cage the shit out of any brown people, foreign or domestic.

He could use that fucking awful AUMF bullshit to send in the U.S. military to attack the IDF, for that matter. “No power” is fucking nonsense.

Yeah, I know that is never going to happen, nor would I particularly want it to. But when you have the power to go that far, you have a fuck ton of options in between that and doing absolutely nothing (or worse than nothing, which is what Biden is doing now: providing them cover by pretending the empire doesn’t 100% have the fascists’ backs).

What’s clear is that each decision — whether to fund a treatment facility or buy a squad car — is a trade-off.

No. Not at all, really. When “sparks debate” is the best you can do. God, I hate the mainstream news so fucking much.

Still pretty weak, TBH. Language calling Hamas’ actions “attacks on random Israeli civilians” while giving at least some credence to the phrase “Israel’s right to defend itself.” That’s a lot of giveaway to imperialist and Zionist propaganda while allegedly trying to clear the air on who holds what opinions.

This is an anti-colonial struggle. Colonized people have a right to defend themselves. Nation-states absolutely fucking do not, nor do colonizers while they violently expand their colonies, uphold apartheid, and continue to commit genocide. Upholding one’s oppression is not coherent with self-defense, sorry.

What, they didn’t trot out Joe the Plumber again? SMH.

I don’t take that as a doomer view at all. It’s the view that we must eliminate bosses. Which, to me, is actually a far more positive view than the one that sees having bosses as inevitable, but simply wants slightly higher compensation from the slave masters.

I’d say more that there’s no such thing as a fair share as long as bosses exist. But yeah, also true: to take real steps in the right direction definitely requires exerting power, not begging.

Excellent. Was going to recommend another, similar video, but it’s one of the ones Second Thought links to at the end. Nice.

Of course political speech is illegal. Always has been. It just isn’t nominally legal on paper. People have been indicted, prosecuted, and imprisoned for it constantly. A famous example is Eugene Debs, who was prosecuted under the Espionage Act and imprisoned for an anti-war speech he made in 1918.

Please don’t be taken in by the veneer of moronic constitutionalist liberalism. The state punishes people when it feels like punishing people, and does so especially for political speech and dissent…for being an anarchist; for being a leftist. The propaganda it puts down on paper has never changed that.

Judges protect the state like any other part of the fascist system. Doubtful they’ll find a reason to be “sane” or otherwise reasonable to people acting to protect us against the state’s own goons.

I guess it’s a hope. Just don’t count on it. The only people who are really here to protect us is us.

Definitely what the RICO Act was sold to us as being designed for. /s

Fuck the police. Fuck the state.

Restaurants run on hierarchy, or so I’ve always been told. There’s got to be someone in charge, someone giving orders, in order for the whole thing to run right… The last person I worked for, one of the most experienced and talented restaurant people I’ve ever met, always said it’s best to run a restaurant as a “benign dictatorship.”

I mean, liberals (and authorities like owners/executives/managers/politicians) will tell you this about literally everything, not just restaurants. So there’s no particular reason to believe them, and many millennia of history filled with reasons to not believe them. shrug