General Politics XII World • Page 591

One of the Jacobin writers caught flack a few days ago for publishing something extremely false or something like that, but how many people ran with it

 

Certainly easier said than done, and several others have already mentioned this post-election, but it's so important right now to just throw yourself into something that can occupy your time, whether that's family, a hobby, professional development, whatever your fancy

 

If you focus on your job I give you a swirlie

 

The sentiment has been true since October of 2023, where it’s been screaming into the void to get anyone in power to care about stopping support of a genocide. The election was kind of numb for me compared to that

 

Love to keep lukewarm Diet Coke next to my bed

 

The Fire Chief also wrote a letter in December complaining about budget issues. Basically, it looks as if the Police Department DID get increases to its budget (despite lower crime rates and fewer officers, as the initial tweet states) where the Fire Department ultimately got raises but not an increase they could apply to services, and so there was a cut to services due to budget issues. Compared to police, who - again - for more money than they needed.

As @Victor Eremita says, who knows how much difference more Firefighters could even make, tho. This is a natural disaster exacerbated by climate change, which is the result of policy dictated by a ruling class doing blood sacrifices.

 

Yeah, the whole Fire Department funding thing does seem like an easy red herring that is sucking up energy that should be directed to discussing why the area hadn't had any rain in 8 months (the answer is climate change), which created the conditions for these fires.

 

Would be great if there was a political force that could articulate a connection between Helene and the LA wildfires, demonstrating that they are each part of the same crisis created by the ultra wealthy, potentially bringing residents of both Appalachia and California into a similar struggle in the process.

 

but egg prices

 

I’ll start off saying this by saying that to an extent I agree with folks who say generations discourse is inherently divisive/reactuonary. Also, this is all extremely broad-strokes bullshit I’m about to say. But as far as it relates to those of us who have experienced historical events and cultural changes within the same rough phases of our lives:

American millennials are not shit, thus far. We have totally abdicated our responsibility to pursue a new future. We have continually outsourced our political agency to 90 year old former segregationists and sex pests. We should have been forcibly occupying buildings for the past decade. Gen X was brought up in an era which insisted that no alternative was possible during the Cold War - an entire vocabulary of class consciousness kept away from them before the internet - while Gen Z was born into Hell and is nihilistic as a result. Millennials have experienced things that have radicalized them and that have raised consciousness, but instead of taking that knowledge and committing to action, we have decided that we are actually babies into our 30s and 40s.

I think there’s been this persistent hope that someone will take care of things if we just cede our power to them - Obama, tech, Bernie, etc. - and we have to ditch that and commit ourselves to the difficult and dangerous work of actual revolutionary life.

 

You can talk about both climate change and egg prices at the same time, and also put the blame on the same class for both. We should do that, in fact! Lol

 

Okay, this is worse

 

As I've said before young men have always been reactionary assholes
But good lord are the ones now terrifying lol

 

i was mostly just laughing at the “broccoli headed kids” part but, given your comments here, I will point out that millennials were a huge chunk of 3 huge protests movements (Iraq, occupy, blm) and got the shit beat out of them repeatedly for it. Combined with being locked out of power via elections by a boomer generation not relinquishing power and a party apparatus that prioritizes incumbents over young idealists…i can’t say I totally blame so many of them for checking out

 

I mean, not to oversimplify things, but when your demands are:

anti-imperialist
anti-corporate
anti-racist

then yes, the ruling class with its roots in those things is going to beat the shit out of you lol Every resistance movement ever got the shit beat out of them. They all were made of people who had jobs, families, responsibilities, etc. So far, compared to successful resistance movements, the protests you listed have been easily dismissed. Personally, I put this on the relative comfort that many young Americans can live in compared to the vast, vast majority of people fighting for liberation in the past (internet/tv, air conditioning, etc.). But, we’re going to have to forgo a lot of that stuff if we actually Want It.