58 points
*

This whole thing is so fucked, I know y’all Americans could get insulin for pennies on the dollar if it was made in a nationalized pharma company. You could get high speed rail built within a decade, we know it’s possible because they did it in China. You could guarantee jobs for at least a generation just re-tooling infrastructure or re-building it. All of it is so easy to imagine how it could happen except for one fucking thing, your political system but especially your democrats. It’s just too bad you can’t reach people with a message like the Bolsheviks had, not “peace, land, bread” but maybe something like “medicine, trains, jobs, peace.” But people just wouldn’t believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years. It’s all possible if you get rid of your shitty political class.

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37 points

My partner and I talk about this so much about how easy it would be for the political class to do well and uphold capitalism for the next few decades but instead they’d rather a few more billionaires exist.

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37 points

this is another of capitalism’s contradictions.

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9 points

I mean that’s the problem with Keynesianism, it’s a pitch to the wrong people. The actual capitalist ruling class doesn’t have a truly ideological commitment to preserving capitalist society, they are only interested in immediate profit and extraction. Instead it appeals to ideological nerds with no real power like economics departments.

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30 points

But people just wouldn’t believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years.

And this is why any non-duopoly political movement in the US, even a socialist one, is doomed to fail. People in this country intrinsically know, even if they can’t artciulate it, that government exists only to hurt them and politicians are all hucksters. Plus protests are scary, disruption is scary, communism is scary. People have absolutely no reason to trust a party promising radical change for the better when that’s what every politician’s been promising since 1972 with no results. Doubly so for the scary socialists who love mask mandates and antifa and hate everything else.

Mr. Bones’ wild ride will not get better, it must crash.

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8 points

I think you could launch a successful third party campaign based on exactly this point. but you’d need a lot of money and good execution.

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It would be Bernie 3.0, with similar results. I think the electoral route’s been thoroughly proven non-viable.

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20 points
*

But people just wouldn’t believe you after being lied to by every other political force for 50 years

I think this is what sunk Corbyn and to a lesser extent Bernie. But not only mistrust, but also the totally rational belief that neither would be able to accomplish what they want because the political machine would stop them.

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12 points

It’s just too bad you can’t reach people with a message like the Bolsheviks had, not “peace, land, bread” but maybe something like “medicine, trains, jobs, peace.”

The problem isn’t just that people wouldn’t believe us, it’s that americans don’t even want these good things. Their brains are so warped by propaganda that they think crumbling infrastructure, traffic everywhere, dying of preventable diseases, and endless war are good things. The situation is beyond hopeless, these people are unsalvageable

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5 points

Try weed, debt relief, healthcare and you’ve got the Bernie campaign.

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GROW MORE CORN MORE CORN MUST BE GROWN RAZE THE FIELDS GROW CORN DEPLETE THE TOPSOIL GROW CORN

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30 points

Am sure glad corn doesn’t need imported and/or oil-origin fertilizers.

Oh wait

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19 points

just last night there was a post here about how we will deplete all our top soil in the next 60 years, then this news is announced :joker-shopping:

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:corn-man-khrush:

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30 points
*

People are saying we should just build more trains but I promise you most Americans would never use them. The people of this country would rather go bankrupt while cooking themselves alive than wait at a tram stop.

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22 points

You’d need a big pro-train media push to go with it. Put luxury train travel in MCU slops. Actually run anti-car and anti-plane newspieces. Start train-based tiktok trends. Have people bragging about their commute going from 90min in grueling traffic to 30min that they can spend vibing and getting hammered.

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8 points

You can ideology all you want, if it allows to sleep 20 more minutes in the morning people will use them :shrug-outta-hecks:

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4 points
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I promise you most Americans would never use them

Back in '06 when gas was hitting similar levels, the buses and trains were absolutely overflowing with new ridership and cities were scrambling to expand the systems to support the excess capacity.

Like, you can shit on Econ 101 tier arguments all you want, but at the end of the day $6/gal gas changes how people behave.

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4 points

I think this as well. Car culture is too deeply ingrained. It has become part of our identity. Freedom, Liberty, etc etc

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:fedposting: WE’VE GOT YOU SURROUNDED! FILL UP ON CORN FUEL

:troll: I HATE CARS I HATE CARS I HATE CARS

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24 points

Everyone knows ethanol for fuel is terrible policy. Worse for carbon, and causes more engine wear over time meaning people will just have to be spending more on car repairs and more resources dedicated to replacement parts. We will do anything to protect the society-wide madness of the personal automobile.

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11 points

Sounds like a feature, not a bug.

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