I'm an apprentice electrician, and I definitely feel you. Just yesterday I had to talk to my journeyman for something like an hour about DEI just because I slightly pushed back on what he was saying. Before I started, I expected that being in the union would at least weed out some of the worst reactionaries, but unfortunately it is not the case at all

That kind of shit is why I stopped listening to Sabaton. I like their music, and they have multiple songs from a pro-Soviet perspective, but they have just as many (if not more) that glorify nazis. Including that one Finnish guy who fought in the Finnish army, joined the Waffen-SS to fight the USSR, and then joined the US army and fought in Vietnam

I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to people in general, but you may be surprised by how far left some people in DSA are. I'm in sort of a similar area where I'm too far from my nearest major city (Atlanta) to make it to events regularly, but still want to be involved. While I was in DSA, there were plenty of people active in the Slack server, ranging from socdems to incredibly well-read MLs. Even if you can't make it to a protest or something, they usually still have social events too that come with more advance notice.

I also wouldn't shy away from being friends with "normal" people. The whole project of the left requires getting those people on our side, and a lot of them are most likely not going to come to the correct conclusions on their own without someone to help them along

At this point it feels like leftists are the only group not involved in political assassinations

In 2024, as the Zapatista caracoles were closed to outside collaborations in order to reorganize

I've been checking the Schools for Chiapas website for the last year trying to buy some of their corn, I suppose that's probably why they haven't had any

Yeah it helps when it's a bunch of people who have been protesting this whole time, rather than only showing up after the election lol

I'm glad to see PSL, the Green Party, and Cornel West are all collaborating. I don't think I've seen major third-party campaigns explicitly support each other like this in the past. Obviously it won't change the outcome of the election at all, but for people like me, where I had to vote for Stein since Claudia and Karina (as well as Cornel West) got removed from the ballot in Georgia, it's helpful to see there's at least a similarly-aligned option

I don't remember the source, but I always think back to that Stalin quote where he said he felt like a cult of personality was being built around him, with the aim that it would be used against him eventually. It seems like his suspicions were true, since that is exactly what happened after his death.

Reading about things like him being referenced in the national anthem, or the naming of Stalingrad, as a couple examples, there's always a note that he objected to it before it was approved over his objection. Of course that's usually portrayed as him putting on a show after ordering the things himself, but it seems to line up with the idea that it wasn't being pushed by him, since he's noted as disapproving of those kinds of things every time I've read about them.

It's been probably a couple of years now, I stopped in the middle of an episode after Robert or the guest or someone (I don't really remember at this point lol) went on an apropos of nothing rant against China, and I haven't listened since. It had been getting on my nerves for a while, but that was the last straw for me. Something about an "anarchist" who makes their living entirely off of corporate sponsorships, enough that they stopped being a journalist and moved into a "compound" (his word, iirc), never sat right with me anyway.

There was an FRSO guy on the Upstream podcast recently, explaining dialectical materialism. The host also asked him about the org, so he explained a good bit there

Can anyone suggest a good current events recap video or something similar? Some of my siblings were recently homeless for several weeks, and now that things have improved and stabilized for them, one of them mentioned feeling like they don't know anything that's going on right now. I was hoping there's something out there that would help them get caught back up, without me sending them like ten different videos on individual topics

Goes to show that the "two-state solution" is a liberal fantasy that could never actually happen