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Cake day: March 19th, 2024

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  • BobTheDestroyertoMemes@lemmy.mlI'm a leftist
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    9 days ago

    You seem to be arguing that FDR was a leftist because of the policies he implemented. But I think what you are missing is why he implemented those policies. I think the truth is he didn’t really have the public interest at heart. His agenda was to contain a growing threat to capitalism in the form of the Communist Party of the 1930s. His strategy to contain the CP was to neuter the party by bringing it into the Democratic party fold, alienating their most militant members, and slowly squashing their agenda. Of course he had to appeal to their interests to do so. But it was a temporary strategy, not a real shift in US policy. There are a few articles on the topic if you are genuinely interested. Here’s one. And here’s a quote from another.

    The New Deal reforms Sanders evokes were not the product of a farsighted, enlightened reformer, but responses to tumultuous class struggles in the early and mid-1930s. These reforms sought to contain explosive social struggles and were never truly universal, excluding women and African-Americans, for example. After mass struggle ebbed, Roosevelt shifted back to his original goal of stabilizing US capitalism while moving toward establishing US global domination during World War II. Progressive reforms came to an abrupt halt in the late 1930s, allowing the rollback of many popular gains during the 1940s.






  • I’ve accepted collapse as inevitable and have spent many years watching it happen. The system isn’t rational. It treats humans as exploitable disposable resources. It treats the natural systems we depend on for our lives as exploitable resources to be used up and converted into numbers in a bank account. It concentrates power and influence in the hands of those who want nothing more than to maintain the system that benefits them and nobody else. The system will collapse in the same way that the last cinders of a house collapse after it has burned down. We have enjoyed many thousands of years of stable climate but the holocene is coming to an end. Globalism is coming to and end, because most places on the globe will soon be uninhabitable. And it’s entirely the fault of capitalism, or perhaps the selfishness and psychopathy that brings about systems like capitalism. And there is no escape. The best you can hope for is to disentangle yourself from it as much as possible so you don’t get so burned in the collapse. For years I’ve been trying to reduce external dependencies, grow my own food, pay off debts, mortgage, haven’t bought a new car for twenty years. I don’t know exactly what I’m preparing for, but I expect it to be unpleasant. It’s become a mission of a sort. A purpose.

    I’m not actually sure I’m keeping my sanity. But I don’t want to be part of a system that I know is insane. And while I haven’t fully extricated myself from it, I do have a plan, and it helps keep me from completely loosing my mind.









  • My wife uses the term mostly to complain about the shows on Amazon or Netflix. What she means when she says it is a combination of several things. The more boxes you can check the more ‘woke’ it is.

    1. Female protagonists regularly defeating much larger males in hand-to-hand combat.
    2. You can predict early on who is going to be the surprise villain and who will turn out to be the good guy. The villain will be the white male and the good guy will be someone who isn’t a white male.
    3. The white males are presented as stupid, cowardly, and evil but the women and people of color are noble, smart, and strong.
    4. In business settings women and people of color are the ones in charge or in power.

    She feels these shows are presenting a world view that doesn’t correspond to her observed experience, and a large part of what she means is she likes her white male husband and thinks it’s unrealistic to depict all white men as evil cowardly buffoons. I find her complaints tiresome, but it does feel nice that she wants to defend me even if these shows have nothing to do with me.

    Personally, I understand media representation is important. And I understand that it’s more normal for young people today to expect that than it was in the 80’s when I was a teen. Though it often seems to make a today’s shows more trite and predictable.