I’ll give you a full rebuttal as soon as I’m done reaching the top shelf and unscrewing the lid of the pickle jar.

Nothing masculine about tepid conformity.

A yearning desire to be indistinguishable from one’s peers and find acceptance in the tribe is peak toxic masculinity.

I’m more of a summer/spring in my color scheme

Without replacing the bourgeois state with a socialist, proletarian one, the ready-made levers for reinforcing the bourgeois mode of production will cause a reversion. The Paris Commune was the first such example of this failure in action.

The Soviet Union was one of the latest. Yeltsin taking office, failing to get his way, and then shelling parliament into surrender being the most prominent example of the failures of electoralism, even in an ostensibly proletarian state.

Gaza also a great instance of the wages of strict electoralism. You rally your people behind a more militant political body (Hamas in 2006) and the end result is your heavily armed neighbors using the results of an election as causa belli. Hell, the American Civil War is another great example, what with a Southern coup government rising up after a Presidential election defeat.

It is through organization and revolution that we can actually move on into a better world.

It gives us a fighting chance, at least. But it is also hard, painful, and requiring enormous self-sacrifice particularly among the early adopters.

Potato skins are where the nutrients are at. Also lots of flavor.

Idk if I’d say the same about carrots

He certainly wrote a version of it.

Never ask a man his salary

Never ask a woman her age

Never ask what George Orwell was doing in Myanmar in the 1920s

Amtrak isn’t good

Going from DC to NYC without stepping onto a plane or fighting traffic is such a blessing.

Is this Houston?

This sounds exactly like Houston.

We have a street whenever a telephone pool is squarely in the center of the sidewalk, such that you have to squeeze between a building and the pole to pass it or step into a three lane one way street with a 35mph speed limit

My EV will be in the garage because its not out of gas

🎵 Plug it in, Plug it in 🎶

In a society where the will of the majority is ignored in favour of the will of the few I think most people would agree it’s an authoritarian society

Sure. But then the reverse is true, as well. Libertarians call it “mob rule”

Hitler’s government qualifies as “authoritarian” in the same way that FDR’s government does. It can describe Starmer’s UK. Or Sheinbaum’s Mexico. It can be applied as easily to Lai Ching-te’s Taiwan as Xi’s China. It’s a nothingburger of a word, mostly implying you don’t like the policies of the person in charge.

I mean, it’s definitely a deliberately ill-defined term that’s used to conflate dictatorships of the bourgeoisie and dictatorships of proletariat. Also, mysteriously, never seems to describe friendly oligarchies like MBS’s Saudi Arabia, Netanyahu’s Israel, Milei’s Argentina, or Bukele’s El Salvador.

But its language that’s very intentionally borrowed from Anarcho-Capitalism, intended to defame any kind of public governing structure. The end goal of describing every governing body we don’t like as “authoritarian” is to venerate “free markets” as a utopian alternative to popular governance.

It’s not just about communism. It’s a term intended to denigrate any kind of popular government.

Far-Right: Trump

Far-Left: DSA

The Middle: ducking Amy Klobacher throwing a stapler

Sure. But the meme still holds.