He/They. Marxist-Leninist, Butcher, DnD 3.5e enthusiast and member of PSL NEO and UFCW local 880. ASAB (All Scolds Are Bastards). Plague rat settler. I administrate a DnD 3.5e West Marches server for Socialists called the Axe and Sickle. https://discord.gg/R5dPsZU

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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: March 24th, 2022

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  • Most cities have a bus service, but they only rarely connect to smaller towns (“smaller” being relative here, like 30,000 people).

    To put it in perspective, I live in a suburban apartment outside of a medium-sized city in Ohio. There is a single busline that goes through my neighborhood (which thankfully has a stop right outside my complex). A bus comes by once an hour between 7 AM and 7 PM.

    This can get you to work if you’re lucky enough to work a 9-5 next to a bus stop. My work has a bus stop, but I work a 4-12, so no luck.

    My favorite bar is in the next town over, a college town about 15 minutes down the road. If I wanted to get there by public transit, I would need to wait for the hourly bus outside of my apartment, get off at a grocery store, wait about a half an hour for a connecting bus from the college town’s bus service, and that’s not even counting the drive time.

    And if I don’t leave the bar by 6 PM, of course, I’m stranded without an Uber or something, because even on weekends (not that I have weekends off work) the busses only run till 7 PM.

    And there’s other towns nearby that I literally cannot take public transport to. I had to work an event in a smaller city (but still probably within the top 20 in the state for population) about half an hour drive away. There is no bus service that connects me to them. The only options are driving or Uber.





  • I agree, but -

    The thing about Age of Consent laws is that a case will never stand up in court unless the victim testifies. Even if a 50-y/o man is sleeping with a 14 y/o girl, it’s practically impossible to prove criminality unless the victim testifies in court against him (and even then, there’s a good chance that the judge will throw out the case anyways).

    I think men that are paranoid about the legality of age gaps in relationships are either (1). Worried because they are taking advantage of young girls and think they would testify in court against then given the chance, or (2). Are more worried about what their social circles would think of them than a court of law.











  • This is the essence of “meeting people where they’re at”, though. You are not going to turn a significant percentage of the white middle class into disciplined Marxists. The material conditions don’t exist for it.

    It’s like, I’m in the PSL and we organize a lot of protests. Our local Indivisible branch is pretty cool as far as Libs go - they’re willing to work with us, they’re willing to learn, they’re pro-trans rights and lean towards Palestine (but Indivisible at the national level forbids local branches from doing Palestine stuff because they’re full of Zionists). And they have thousands of members, in a relatively small city.

    But recently they’ve been expressing anxiety to me about liability - that they haven’t been able to get event insurance for their protests, that they’re being told they need insurance to get permits, that they believe in going through “the proper channels” especially because we live in a Democrat city. They’re worried about prosecution or lawsuits because they’re professional-class boomers, they have qualifications (legal/medical/engineering/etc.) that can be taken away, they have houses they could lose in a lawsuit, they have kids and grandkids to take care of.

    It comes down to material conditions. The more I work with them, the more empathetic I try to be - they’re doing what can be expected of them wrt their class position in society. They’re not Marxists but they’re never going to be.


  • I’ve been doing a lot of work with 50501/Indivisible recently. Because my account is somewhat linked to my real identity I can’t be too specific or critical. But here’s my take:

    “Kool Karyn” is almost definitely a member of Indivisible, a nationwide Liberal anti-Trump org whose membership is almost exclusively old, middle-class, white liberals.

    In my (majority-black) city, a majority-black protest of 30 will get drones and snipers and tear gas. Indivisible got 2,500 (almost all older, white) people out at a public park protest and the only cops we saw were probably just on their regular patrols.

    I’m gonna punch against the grain: Karen is giving perfectly reasonable advice for her contingent, for the kinds of protests that her organization is organizing. You can criticize their politics, their strategy, their class relations - but cops are not going to drive an AV through a crowd of kneeling white boomers. And the way her post is phrased, at least, does not imply that she is giving general advice to all protestors - just the people going to this particular protest, which will almost certainly be 90% old white libs who are in practically no danger of police violence.

    And just like a bunch of black students were shot at Jackson State and no one cared but when a few white students were at Kent State it was suddenly a big deal, if the old white libs do come under fire, the public and media will care. And, for their politics and class position, that’s actually somewhat brave - old white libs are never going to riot, but (and trust me, I don’t mean this in a hateful way) the most useful things they can do at a protest that is within their temperament and ability is commit to nonviolence and have violence brought unto them by the state.