< looks around at Western countries with militarized police forces, brutal suppression of protest, and high incarceration rates >

“This is fine. Tankies are authoritarian.”

Clinton signed into law a whole raft of neoliberal policies that were started by Bush, and the cumulative effects of those policies over those decades are what we’re feeling right now and what we warned about back then. The frogs have been boiled while the populace bickers about which neoliberal corporate shill sits on the puppet throne. They’re after all our money and they’re getting it by distracting us with the political circus and dividing us with wedge issues.

And the same people that own the media also own and operate the state.

I’m so glad this stuff is starting to finally bubble to the top of the public consciousness.

Now, everybody read Marx.

When you Google for “best whatever” and land on a reddit thread, take some time to look at the histories of the people commenting.

You’ll find many cases where the only post they’ve ever made was for that product, and cases where the person posting the question also posts in the comments with an answer, like they forgot to switch to alt accounts.

A lot of it is obvious SEO marketing nonsense. Trust nothing. The entire Internet is trying to scam you. Enshittification, indeed. This used to be a nice neighborhood before the capitalists moved in in the 90s.

Here’s me discovering socialism, new to the (actual) ideas but vibing with them pretty well.

Start talking about it online.

Anarchist: fuck you you stupid fucking tankie.

I had no idea what a tankie was, but I figured out real quick that anarchists are the angsty atheists of the political world.

When eating chicken wing flats, if you pry the bones apart you can slip them out and you’re left with a single piece of meat you can eat whole. You don’t have leftover bits in the middle of the two bones.

Also, keep nitrile gloves in your glove box or purse and use them when eating messy things like wings and ribs and cake.

“. . . . except as a punishment for crime . . . .”

Slavery never stopped, it just evolved. There’s a reason black men are so overrepresented in the prison system.

The US is a fascist country. If you live here and you don’t feel it, you are benefiting from it.

You can hardly blame them. It’s a 24/7 onslaught of propaganda and it’s incredibly difficult to break out.

And even when I initially woke up out of it I frequently questioned my sanity. Is this real? Is this actually what’s happening? How can nobody else see this?

And then I wanted to go back to not knowing because of the incredible weight that knowledge puts on your shoulders, but it’s impossible. There’s no going back, at least for me.

Every single problem we face is caused or exacerbated by the logic of capitalism.

So yes, capitalism is bad. Sorry that pointing it out triggers you, but it’s important to do so that people begin to understand and we can collectively do something about it. Infinite growth on a finite planet isn’t feasible and it’s killing all of us.

It’s not just the news. It’s TV shows, movies, books, periodicals, commercials - even music. The oligarchs have massive influence over all of it and can manipulate the public at will.

There are six companies that control a very large percentage of the media consumed by Americans. They are all mega corporations. The media Americans consume is mostly corporate propaganda, and it’s invisible to us. It’s the water we swim in.

Whatever opinions the oligarchs want us to have are dictated to us.

It is not a coincidence that all our national political races come down to a wire, that we are divided almost 50/50. We are being intentionally divided so that we don’t unite and challenge the oligarchy.