I don’t think this is quite true. People that call themselves centrists can come from a benign place. In my mind, the folks that call themselves centrists tend to mainly care about preserving the status quo, no matter what it is.

They’ll usually use terms like “big tent”, “adult in the room”, and if they went to school “realpolitik”. Usually privileged, they don’t understand the urgency for change for those in need, so they’ll balk at any method that may actually achieve some progress for the marginalized and underprivileged. Usually they’ll say some wise, enlightened thing about “optics”.

And they’ll tell themselves that they care. They’ll tell themselves and others that they’re the good guys. They’ll watch CNN and read the economist, and they’ll tell themselves they’re informed. They’re always on the right side of history, but only ever when it’s already too late. I think they genuinely don’t know.

… AND THE HOOOME OF THE BRAAAAAVE

Not to mention Oprah

The purpose of a system is what it does. Capitalism is functioning perfectly fine.

I feel like you’re a bit too emotionally involved. It’s just a cartoon, calm down.

Anyway, to clarify my comment, which I thought was brief and to the point enough that it was easy to grasp, but apparently not for you: I don’t think there’s anything wrong with covering current events or lampooning stuff. The way south park does this is sanctimonious and smug, to the point where I find it a bit hard to watch.

Whenever they take on real world stuff, they’re incredibly smug and sanctimonious about it. This has been the case since the start, and I can’t say I’ve ever been able to get past that.

You’re the type of person to call folks not getting out of bed because of their depression “just being lazy”

Inb4 “no this is different”

I’m getting strong rest of the owl vibes from a lot of what you say.

So for example, you say you need strong allies. Well, list some candidates! China? They have a policy of non-intervention, so don’t count on it. Cuba? Not very strong. The US, or some other nation that’s captured by the owning class (Netherlands, France, Germany, etc)? Fat chance.

Same with the focus having folks join unions more. I think it’s a great outcome to strive for, but how do we achieve that goal? On a systemic level we see union membership dropping, and that’s no coincidence, because more and more anti-union legislation is enacted across the board in Europe and America. And that in turn is no coincidence because the people who really don’t want us to unionize have enough money to lobby this legislation into existence, and they happen to own the media, so they’re also doing a good job of convincing us that it is against our interests to join a union. Voting a pro-union candidate into power is incredibly difficult for the simple fact that campaign funds are a pretty decent predictor of electoral success, and guess who has the money to contribute significant amounts to those funds? Not me.

The education thing too is pretty great, but it assumes that some worker-friendly entity already has control over the education system. How do you get there? And education only goes so far of course. At some point folks leave the educational system, and their main source of information becomes the media. I’ve seen well-educated folks be completely convinced that there is no genocide in Gaza, and I could not blame them, because for the first year no major outlet would even utter the word. How do you prevent the media from being captured by the owning class?

Ultimately the problem is that the opponent has the means and willingness to use violence to quell your movement. And they’ve shown time and again that they will use these means, and history shows it works (Allende, the Spanish anarchist revolution, the Paris commune, Indonesia’s takeover by Suharto, Lumumba, etc). How do you defend yourself effectively against a violent aggressor without resorting to illiberal means yourself?

Hahaha you’re literally doing the thing. Good stuff

Yeah! And we need to do it in a way where the incredibly rich and powerful who have a vested interest and desparate need for us to fail won’t kill our movement! In the past and present, any socialist movement was met with

• death squads
• propaganda
• military invasions
• assasinations of heads of state
• funding, arming, and training the opposition
• economic sanctions
• so, so much propaganda

all funded by the absurdly wealthy to make nations fail and make them more amenable to re-exploitation by the owning class.

Any ideas on how to defend ourselves against this phenomenon which occurs over and over again?

They did fail to demonstrate knowledge of lexicographical order, which this exercise seems to be aiming for with the inclusion of pond and pumpkin, so I think it’s a bit cynical to consider failing the student on this a means of opression or subjugation.

Ok, let’s indulge in your racist rhetoric a little bit. What you’re essentially claiming is that violent crime will go up if there are more immigrants. However, if you look at actual data, you’ll see that the number of violent crimes per capita for undocumented immigrants is much, much lower than for citizens. Reality just doesn’t line up with your BS. Facts don’t care about your feelings.

Fearmongerers be like…

Trafficked women and children be like… HELP

Drug couriers be like… THANKS

Terrorists be like…EASY

So how did the general strike go?

Yes this is correct, we’re in complete agreement there. The comment I was responding to worded it vaguely though, which made it sound like you cannot get a divorce because you have a sexless marriage. It made it sound like people were being forcibly kept married, which is false. You can get divorced because it’s Tuesday, or because the moon is in retroflux. Holding your spouse responsible for those things is a different story, however.

For reference here’s the part of the comment I replied to:

Should a person not be allowed to divorce if they fell out of love with their partner, ergo they turned out to have less or no more sex?

Emphasis mine.

Should a person not be allowed to divorce if they fell out of love with their partner, ergo they turned out to have less or no more sex?

They absolutely should, and they will still be able to, nothing’s changed there.

Quickest way to get a test suite so tightly coupled to structure rather than behavior that even just looking at the tests wrong makes them fail. But technically you do get test coverage I guess. Goodhart’s law in action.

The moderate wing of fascism in action.

since they can use things like sick/vacation days conveniently timed right

American workers live in such a different world. Not once in my 34 years on earth would it have occurred to me to go on sick leave or spend one of my holidays on strike. Absolutely insane.

Every big change is ultimately just a series of small changes. It takes skill and engineering chops to be able to break up big ideas into small steps with quick feedback loops, but it can be done. Usually worth the effort too.