I mean, small businesses are petite bourgeoisie. That’s just the definition of the term. That doesn’t mean they are an enemy of socialism and I don’t think that’s what the person you’re replying to was saying. Of course it would be ideal for small businesses to adopt a cooperative structure but it would be foolish to suddenly try and push that on existing small business owners. In the meantime it’s good to change policy to favor small business over corporations because it distributes wealth more evenly, enables greater social mobility, and fosters community.

GEO Group is a prison contractor that’s been hired by ICE to build, run, and maintain their facilities. The shooter is an employee of a private corporation but the corporation he works for is on the public dime. ICE isn’t protecting him like they protect their own employees because as private security he will be held accountable as an individual rather than having the agency or even the private corporation he works for held accountable. They’re more than happy to throw one guy under the bus to avoid accountability for themselves, and while they can’t do that with ICE agents they can with private security.

It’s not a good idea at all. The problems it creates are greater in both number and difficulty than the problems it solves.

He’s only saying this because he’s seen the polls on support for Israel and the Iran war and he wants to be a viable presidential candidate in 2028.

His base has been convinced that all renewable energy development is just a big grift for people to get rich off of government subsidies, which coincidentally is exactly what fossil fuel subsidies are for. The “no you” defense is the most successful strategy in history, so successful that it’s enabling our own extinction.

Oh, I agree completely. Beshear thinks he got elected in a red state because he tiptoes around culture war issues and appeals to common ground, but the real reason is because he captured the populist energy of teachers’ unions (not that he did much with it). If he can capture populist energy again (and he could, it’s everywhere right now) he can get away with being a lot more bold, but I’m not sure he knows how to do that anymore.

Even in death he continues to obstruct democracy.

Beshear is governor of Kentucky. He’s walking on eggshells and has been for his entire career in politics.

It’s not either/or, it’s a self-reinforcing cycle, though it isn’t usually the drugs themselves that start it.

I get where you’re coming from. I just think people are sick of hearing the argument that we shouldn’t run woman or minority candidates because racism/misogyny will harm their chance of success, myself included. I believe that the number of people who will absolutely refuse to ever vote for a woman or minority is often greatly exaggerated, and the number of people harboring racist/misogynist views who would still vote for a woman or minority in the right circumstances is vastly underestimated. When we talk about why a candidate won or lost an election it’s disingenuous to attribute it to something that had only a minor impact when compared to something that has proven to have had a massive (and election swinging) impact. In the case of the 2024 presidential election that something was Harris’s support for Israel’s genocide, and so it isn’t wrong to say that was the deciding factor in the election and racism/misogyny wasn’t.

What you’re missing is that even racists and misogynists will vote for women or minorities if they say the right talking points. Just look at all the pick-mes on the fascist side. This argument is always trotted out by “centrists” against progressives, but the centrists love to run women and minorities, act like that makes them progressive, and blame racism/misogyny when they lose for being uninspiring empty suits. I’m sick of the hypocrisy.

“Old guard” isn’t referring to age, it’s referring to the neoliberal democratic establishment who are currently facing challenges from progressives and democratic socialists. George Santos is completely unrelated to anything that’s being discussed here.

You have friends that have made a therapeutic ritual out of using essential oils which helps them only because the placebo effect can be very powerful for pain. Literally anything could stand in for the essential oils. Swap their oil vials out with convincing fakes and they’ll never know the difference because it’s the ritual of smelling and/or applying the oils that’s helping them, not any real physical mechanism of the compounds in the oils interacting with their biology.

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”

– Franklin Delano Roosevelt, leader of the Democratic party at its most popular and most powerful

They should try to heed the wisdom of their predecessor, or they can instead demonstrate how far the party has fallen.

I think my desire for a small electric pickup truck might override my caution in this case, we’ll see if I get burned. At the very least I’m not going to preorder and will wait for real critical reviews after it’s released.

In the United States, democratic socialists’ policies tend to support working within the capitalist system rather than abolishing it outright.

In the United States, Social Democrats call themselves Democratic Socialists. Or are they just using social democracy to get their foot in the door so democratic socialism can follow? Only time will tell. I know what I’m hoping for, but I do worry a bit that there isn’t a follow-up plan. Even so, social democracy is much more fertile ground for a real socialist movement to thrive.

When people say democracy, they usually mean direct democracy.

This just isn’t true. The majority of democracies around the world today are representative democracies, and people colloquially refer to them simply as democracies.

And even at that, the party establishment control who we can even vote for. So we only get to choose from the representatives they give us for the most part.

That’s partly true to varying degrees depending on what country you’re referring to, but it also isn’t that simple. The methods the establishment uses to control who gets party nominations are mostly indirect (i.e. media manipulating the narrative, PACs and dark money to campaigns, etc.). I think you’re being overly cynical - which is fair - but we have more power than you think we do, we’re just not very good at using it. Cynicism itself is one of the ways that the establishment controls who gets elected.

In short: the establishment has a stranglehold on democracy not because our democracies are fake (flawed, maybe even rigged a bit, sure, but not fake), but because they have us out-organized.

The future doesn’t have to be set in stone. We can create the future we want by demanding it and taking action. I can see a future where a progressive is elected president in 2028 and a critical mass of people successfully petition that president to issue pardons.

What I wonder is how exactly are they going to enshittify it? It’s extremely barebones and modular in a way that anyone can design add-ons and accessories for it. I can see them doing subscriptions and the like for various add-ons but you can always just get the base model and get add-ons elsewhere.

They’ve been promoting it recently and have several working prototypes that they’ve been driving influencers around in. There was one video with Marques Brownlee and they even let him drive it himself.