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Cake day: September 14th, 2026

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  • The most effective form of protest workers have against owners requires no violence at all: It’s strikes, ideally a general strike. The economic damages from even one week of half of the country’s workers refusing to work would force the wealthiest permille to make concessions.

    The principal problem people in the USA have is that your hyperindividualism prevents you from developing a class consciousness with your fellow workers. Most of you are not joining unions to make them strong for collective bargaining, not standing in local elections against establishment candidates, not joining/creating local mutual self-help groups, and so on.


  • Yes, thanks for asking. Did you?

    The Budapest Memoranda do not contain “If someone else (e.g. Russia) attacks you, we will deploy our own military assets against them to defend you”, which would be the requirement for the “the USA agreed to protect Ukraine from Russia in exchange for them giving up their nukes” claim.

    I’m not a fan of the USA’s foreign policy, but there’s no need to claim they promised something they did not.




  • In the USA (which was the focus of OP) I would argue there is virtually no left in the first place. Outliers excluded even their left-most people are still centrists, at best. Note that nowhere I said people should stop voting, it’s kind of crazy how that’s always a knee-jerk assumption. Obviously you still ought to choose the lesser evil - but that must come with doing the other parts. Otherwise, again, you’re just choosing evil.

    That being said: If you live in the USA and you want that to happen, you need to step up. Not say “nobody else is doing it”. You need to do it. If you already are: Congrats! Next you need to accept that you can do everything right and still lose. That’s just life.


  • My point is the nay-sayers here say “don’t vote”, but offer no alternatives.

    I’m a nay-sayer (to doing no more than perpetually voting for the lesser of two evils), and I’ve offered alternatives. I’m also not alone in this, I’ve seen about as many people, proportionally speaking, advocate for the same things in past posts about this here on Lemmy as there are on Reddit. Might this be a bubble issue on your end?

    You say join a union? I say hell yeah, sign me up! Can I join yours?

    Feel free to come to Germany and join one of our unions. The one primarily responsible for negotiating the collective agreement currently determining my salary is ver.di.



  • ExtraJudgement@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.world•Been there
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    21 days ago

    Prejudice is much too generic imho.

    “Races” in racism are (socially constructed, as you said) classes assigned from conception/birth, which racists believe to have class-specific inherited (often behavioural) traits.

    The only functional difference between (classical) racism and the (star) racism of astrology is that one claims inheritance via genetics, the other inheritance via “vibes” from star formations.



  • They might be nicer, but they won’t change their political views. Voters in Germany generally have their basic needs met (thanks to Art. 1 GG). Around 80% of them are still explicitly supporting right-wing political parties on the federal level, whose policies will leave most Germans poorer than they were before.

    The unfortunate reality is that a lot of people - even when they don’t want to say it - have an underlying belief in a hierarchy of “betters” and “others” that they want to uphold. And sadly, no amount of education has proven suitable to fix that.



  • The solution is to stop treating politics like a brief interruption of your normal life around election time, after which you go back to being a passive pawn - which is what most people in the USA have been doing since Reagan at the latest.

    Join a union, stand for local elections, organize strikes. All year round. If you cannot afford to do so right now, start/join local mutual help communities designed to save enough collective time for one of their members to do so. Reject the hyperindividualism injected into your culture by the wealthiest few permille specifically to hinder your ability to gain collective bargaining power.

    Your only bloodless path towards victory is creating a convincing enough economic threat to the personal wealth of elected politicians as a balancing counter force.

    Continue to fail to do so (as a people) and all voting for the lesser evil does is buy you time you’re then wasting.



  • I agree that social hierarchies are a feature of homo sapiens, hence why any good form of governance should be based on restricting our worst instincts. That’s what the original liberalism improved with the separation of political power into executive, legislative, and judicate branches. Unfortunately, the same was not done for economic power, which - most liberal democracies - allowed to keep concentrating with few to no safeguards.