Yup, this is extremely real. I’ve literally seen conservative carpenters do a political 180 when they saw a bunch of socialists (including a lot of LGBTQ+ folks) be the ones to show up and fight alongside them when they went on strike. Best way to get people to stop blaming the scapegoat of the week is to point to what the actual problem is.
If only.
In my experience, no matter how you spell it out doesn’t work. You can get them to agree (common example a few years back was EMT workers making 15/hr) that EMT needs to make more. You can get em to agree that if McD upped their pay EMT be tempted to change jobs to something easier… but then when you finally try to close the deal and get em to say “yes more pay!” They instantly melt back into their Fox/Facebook programming loop.
People whom I respected all my life fail this concept no matter how much I can make em agree on some details. Problem is they already made up their mind (shitty jobs get shitty pay) and will not budge.
Also if you wanna crack the simulation ask em who’s gonna Flip Borger during school hours (it’s a job for teens!!!) They’ve never came up with a response to that but can’t agree with it either.
As for your last point, i feel it bears saying: young people deserve a real wage for their time, too. A job “for teens” is not an excuse to take advantage of people.
Absolutely. 1000% agree.
I love how many pro youth people I keep finding in the fediverse. I’ve gotten absolutely lit up for advocating for young people on the R.
Not least because paying younger people less means they can drive the pay for adults down.
If you want to crack the simulation break away from society and live a life of solitude away from societies influence
Capitalism is a prison that has turned people into nameless parts of an exploitative machine that produces lavish lives for the rich elite that gaslight the same people they exploit
I really wish I could change people’s minds with logic…that hasn’t been my experience.
This is likely due to the outrage machineainly perpetuated by the right wing parties used as a tactic to manipulate their target audiences emotion to change the playing board in their favour
“I won’t change my mind, cause I don’t have to. Cause I’m an American. I won’t change my mind on anything, regardless of the facts that are set out before me. I’m dug in, and I’ll never change.”
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How does one effectively run for a national platform without courting big corporate, given that we know definitively it takes millions of dollars to even have a chance of winning a national level race?
You don’t start at the national level. You start at the local level, which is far more important when it comes to stuff like this. You can propose labor laws as a city councilman, or your state’s general assembly. You can also find candidates in those elections, and assist them by campaigning, canvassing, etc.
What do you do when your state preempts the ability of localities to improve their own conditions, as has been done in many states?
In my experience, the local method has already been the driving method of grassroots movements, and even in seemingly progressive states it can run into these preemption issues.
Similarly, what of projects that are on a scale outside of what is under the purview of the locally elected officials? The next county over to me is so saturated with natural gas wells and so heavily fracked that my county is now experiencing earthquakes and we frequently have worsened air quality due to their emissions. How do I effect change to them without influencing, at the least, the state level, where again it requires more resources than most grassroots organizations are capable of assembling?
There’s also the issue of time tables. Your method of grassroots electoral politics has shown to work in some instances, it’s why my city has municipal fiber and the one over from me is one of the most bikeable around, but given the severe existential threat that climate presents, how do we accelerate what typically takes decades to affect change to something that can create broad, sweeping changes at a societal and infrastructural level quickly enough to enable not only reduction in future damage, but can begin working to repair damages already incurred?
Our system is designed to move slowly, and to allow for actors with more money to have more influence, which currently serves to slow progress even where it is won. My county has been paying for a light rail project that was supposed to be completed in the early 2000s for decades now. Despite agreeing to a contract which was then voted on and passed that would allow use of existing rail, BNSF has continually raised the price to use their rail, and now we’re currently being quoted 2074 for completion of the rail we’ve already paid hundreds of millions of dollars for. We as a state don’t have nearly the resources to force BNSF to negotiate in good faith, and the federal government has shown exactly no willingness to incentivize or force large landholders such as the railroads to do so. Nor do we have the resources to just build our own rail system. So, what do we do here?
Yeah, the cool thing is you don’t need to run for office. There are plenty of volunteer and appointed positions that can help at the local level.
To a lot of people, being paid the same as a burger flipper would be demeaning, even if the pay is more than enough to sustain their lifestyle. To them, it is not enough to be comfortable; those they deem unworthy must also be uncomfortable.
