A "girlfriend man" is actually extremely rare, most people look for a girlfriend, boyfriend, or non-binary friend. I suppose a girlfriend man might fall into the later category but it is still a minority of a minority, if it even exists.

I would recommend more realistic standards, or a more open mind. Start relationships with the people around, rather than holding out for unlikely standards of a man who will be your girlfriend.

One of the most interesting people I've ever met was a woman who hand painted signs and "flash" on windows.

As a teenager, she left home to join the circus, because she wanted to learn how to paint all the signs and posters that you see at circuses and travelling fairs. After several years in a travelling circus, she decided to start a business as a commercial sign company. She invested heavily in vinyl cutters, industrial printers, a large shop to house all the equipment, and hired employees to run the equipment.

But once she started going to meet with potential clients, according to her, nobody wanted the laser cut, industrially precision printed sign work; once clients found out she had the ability to create high quality hand-painted signs and flash, they hired her to do the hand-painted work. It turns out, that people are so bombarded by machine mass manufactured signs and images, that people tend to block it out as so much disinteresting background noise. But the hand-painted stuff stands out, even when produced with near-mechanical levels of precision.

So she sold the big shop and equipment. And now, she drives in a truck, filled with her paint and supplies, to a client with her daughter. The owner says what they want, she and her daughter go back to the truck, design it on the spot, get approval from the owner, paint it same day, take their payment and go on to the next client.

It reminds me of how so many people are getting tired of overproduced auto-tuned music. It just fades into the background.

I think AI content is quickly doing the same thing, fading into the background as slop. But people have such a (rightly) negative opinion of it, that I think a hard return to authenticity is going to come back fast. Its interesting how YouTube has started purging AI content creators. Back when there was a controversy surrounding ai content channels pushing violent and sexual content to children, very little was done outside public outrage. But now that the stuff is actively driving less people to interact with the platforms, the companies are aggressively purging these channels.

when people try real communism

human nature it misunderstands

"Real" communism understands "human nature" in that human nature is not essential but historically and socially contingent. When communism is thought of and implemented abstractly, which you are doing but also in cases where social movements have "tried" it, then it fails to understand that society is made of people and their activity, and can not be thought of abstractly in separating people from the society we create. This is a key insight of Marx.

Unfortunately, usually when people talk about "human nature" they are also being too abstract and can't define exactly what they mean, because in order for something to be essential to humanity it has to be found in virtually every culture in every time. Human nature is always cultural, and culture is shaped by who rules over society.

I mean...what? Marx didn't mention state control? Marx analysed state control in several contexts. He said that communist society was "stateless" so yes he did mention state control under communism in the manifesto. He analysed the "bourgeois" state, and how it compared with feudal kingdoms and states.

The Marxist formulation of the state is that it is a historical/social mechanism to manage class antagonisms. The state in a capitalist country is a capitalist state, which functions to keep the capitalists in power and divide/repress the workers, so the workers can be exploited by the capitalists. So, according to Marx, the state does in fact have to be seized by a mass worker party, smashed, and then replaced with a worker's state.

This would be a transitional stage before communism. Some people call it "socialism." This definitely had been tried, with different kinds of successes and failures in different places at different times.

This is all extremely abstract, and dependent on the time and place where it is "tried". If you "tried communism," as in creating a stateless, classless, moneyless society, according to Marx, it would definitely fail. That is not how theory of change works under Marxism, kind of how you describe "evolve naturally with neighbour working with neighbour and community working with community." Except according to Marx, this change doesn't come about only by people working together, although that will undoubtably be a huge part of it, and such an important part of it I can't fault you for it.

But what will bring about socialism, the transitional phase where the workers have control of a "state," and use it to suppress the capitalists ability to exploit workers for their own profits, will be working together to smash capitalism, liberate as many people as possible -- more people every day from oppressive conditions, institute new forms of real democracy and consent, and defend this revolution from anyone who tries to take power from the masses for themselves. That practical activity is communism. So communism can be tried in our society, in that Marxism isn't just a theory but a theory in practice.

But trying to force a capitalist society into a fully communist society will always fail. And any attempts to do so, even in the name of Marxism, are not Marxist. Marxism rejects prefigurative politics. In fact I don't really think of Marxism as a way of predicting the future, but rather, as a way of seeing what is actually happening in our society so we can take action to change it.

Progressive Stack

MF that's not what progressive stack is. What the actual fuck is this freak talking about

Sure, I definitely agree, as long as it doesn't lead to cutting off from members of the working class engaged in principled electoralism. Something interesting that happened in our chapter recently, is one of my comrades cochaired a campaign to change the way our city votes for city council. Currently they have 9 at large seats, we wanted the city districts to vote for their own reps. Currently city council is bought and paid for by developers who are destroying the public schools in order to get tax abatements for their gentrifying. This had real connections with existing social movement in our city, the launch discussion we had was one of the best experiences I've had in our chapter, as it brought in so many different perspectives, not just DSA people.

The start up to the campaign was long, and really difficult. It required building a coalition with much more liberal progressive groups, a painful and unstable process all the way through. Once it picked up steam and it was obvious that we were gonna get the sigs to make it on the ballot, city council starts trying to coopt, creates their own version that has 9 elected seats and 8 at large. They even name their initiative after our campaign. Obvs people don't go for it and eventually, city council gets it down to 9 and 4 at large.

We take this for a vote at a DSA general meeting. Keep in mind, we have many new and electorally minded members. Our chapter voted to accept city council's recommendation. We (that is the left which included one of the co chairs of the campaign) opposed it strongly, but many newer realignment minded members felt it was a good enough compromise.

So then, the campaign takes it to the progressive coalition. DSA members have already recommended to accept City Council's proposal. Against all expectations, the coalition voted against city councils plan, to continue to the ballot with the plan to change all city council seats to district vote rather than allow any at large seats. We were floored.

My point is, that the left's engagement in leadership from the beginning allowed us to shape the coalition, and keep the campaign on track. A lot of these people are individualistic in the way they conceive of politics, but their experiences inform them. If we can demonstrate another way, then the leaders of the existing working class, reformist and realignmentist that it may be, might decide to side with the people over the establishment, granted a principled left is capable of engaging the base and turning them out.

The problem with electoralism is that winning elections is the theory of change. However winning elections can still he an avenue toward change, given that it is contextualized within a Marxist revolutionary ToC. In that way, elections and campaigns are a quantitative measure, they are a means rather than an end. In the instance of our local campaign, we were able to like discipline the electoralists in DSA by making them face the reality that they had voted to the right of the politically active working class. None of that would have been possible by dealing with electoralism in the abstract.

I mean, criticize the fuck out of them. These debates are happening within DSA, NYC is one of the most rightist branches in the country, and the right factions handling of controversy around electeds has always been extremely conciliatory. The branches are all buttoned up with realignment fetishists, although the left has become more organized recently. NYC DSA legit tried some local dues shenanigans that really appeared to be an effort to split from national, which is much more leftist and critical.

Running for mayor was always going to be a deeply contradictory and unprincipled endeavor. After decades of corruption, the concrete basis for socialist executive action just doesn't exist. There are pieces and parts, I think the mayoral run could move some things forward, but I also worry about how attractive electoral prospects have become to middle class progressives with a reformist/realignment theory of change. We won't really know what impact it will have until 2027 convention, which will be the largest convention ever. The Mamdani run is already having positive effects and changing mass perceptions about socialism.

But the basis still doesn't exist, we are moving from a highly sectarian period into a mass period which is going to test our movements in ways they've never been tested in our lifetimes. Did we prepare ourselves for the coming period? Or will we be left behind while dem realignment/reformists create a flawed and compromised basis for socialism that is easily discredited and brushed aside by liberals and fascists?

For me the question is, how do we engage with these electoralists? We need to dig deeper and build stronger roots in the more exploited layers of the working class. We got a large swath of the middle classes on board, great job! Now we have to build something that can serve as a counter weight to the confused individualism and idealism that is inherent to those privileged layers, before their "leadership" runs the ship aground, again, for 100+ years.

Well, right. The goal is to increase unemployment to lower wages. There are multiple things going on to keep that pressure on, and lowering interest rates .25 or .5% or whatever would be meaningless. Shifting them back to zero might goose borrowing and ease the labor market but also like nobody wants to do that right now. It's fine and natural to act like even market forces are totally neutral, but if you have half a notion you realize that attitudes toward hiring and firing are shaped just as much in the private country club as they are in the market.

I like the example of interest rates because its bound up with inflation and employment in a way that is very recent and easily demonstrable. There's tons of examples of business and finance sickos calling to raise interest rates to drive down wages, while simultaneously raising prices that are directly transferred in the largest part into profits and bonuses, while calling it "inflation." People lived through it, we know it, we understand it, its provable that increasing unemployment to drive down wages to increase profitability is an intentional activity by the political and economic classes.

But I agree, it isn't just interest rates.

Jeffrey Epstein had LOTS of Scientist friends. Stephen Pinker got "kicked off the island" after disagreeing with Epstein's views on eugenics.

Science is impartial, scientific institutions are not

Shedding jobs is literally what our administration has set out to do. Its what the Fed has been aiming for. They recently voted to hold interest rates, with some members voting to raise them. Idk who these "analysts" are, but they're fucking morons. Even if interest rates were cut, it would take like 6 months to a year to see wages and employment bounce back.

I'm def not saying it is good to be losing jobs, but it is intentional.

BUT AT WHAT COST??