I don’t recall this being about sexual abuse, but you can google “On Alienation” which was written by a former member in my city.

I do think it’s true that all American orgs of a certain size have SA problems. However, that is a terrible indictment of the current state of the American left and not a statement that it’s OK. These problems are more than just bad apples. I suspect there’s something about cadre orgs that enables abuse of members. A substantial reason I left Socialist Alternative was their unserious response to multiple sexual assault scandals (one of which was highly publicized and resulted in an international split), which was hampered by their highly centralized leadership. I hope this criticism shows that I’m not a PSL specific wrecker.

well sometimes you can’t tell from the ingredients e.g. bone char sugar, cysteine from feathers instead of bacteria or synthetic. But those are edge cases

What do you mean soy sauce isn’t vegan? Ingredients water, soybeans, wheat, salt.

The Fee Foam cocktail foam is legitimately much less hassle than egg whites. I’m vegan so I don’t know if it tastes better (both are bad in large amounts) but I hear that it’s caught on at bars.

yeah it sucks. I want to get out of apartments but I’m dreading having to participate in the housing market

Thanks. This is the most thorough treatment I’ve seen of higher races leading to lower ballot access.

gross. honestly I’ve had a couple first dates that ended in sex and at least for straight men it’s just not good bc of power dynamics. My armchair psychoanalysis is that these men either (a) are just legitimately fucked in the head and could still get their rocks off with a partner who is still background worried for her physical safety (b) don’t actually want what they want, and that’s why they’re half-assing the whole dating app thing. So they can say they put themselves out there but they don’t have to be actually vulnerable - self-destructive behavior except they’re doing it by being actively shitty to women

Don’t ask for a date “sometime”, give it a time frame like “this week”. Short conversations are perfectly fine and lead to more than 1/3rd of your dates showing up.

an American presidential election? Goku isn’t a citizen but because the Dems don’t give a shit about DACA recipients Superman probably isn’t either. So it’s a tossup

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Met my gf on Hinge. 5 free likes a day was plenty, I “liked” only people I legitimately was interested in going on a date with and sent them a message with the like. If they liked me back they’d usually send their own message (70%? more often than not) and I’d pitch a casual coffee date within a few messages. If they just “liked” me without responding I wouldn’t double-text. If people aren’t responding to you, I think there’s probably something wrong with your messages. E.g. if you are sending like “hi”, “what’s up?”, etc, people aren’t gonna respond. If you message first (especially if you are masc) you gotta be prepared to carry the conversation and also show that you’ve looked at their profile. There may also be something wrong with your profile. Maybe you have a disqualifying quality, like being a communist, that people only notice after matching with you. If so I would suggest to make possible deal-breakers and red flags more obvious in your profile. Cuts down on the useless matches and makes your profile more interesting to the ones you’re interested in.

You’ve probably already noticed this but in my experience Hinge skewed conservative. Pity since it’s the best dating app tech-wise.

yeah the state of plant milk is unfortunate. I buy almond milk since that’s (surprisingly) what’s cheapest in bulk near me, and I don’t think it’s good enough to drink straight. Only for cooking and in coffee

They’d charge us for our actual crimes. You are doing those right? Not just posting?

In religious communities in America, there are few openly gay people.

I know you don’t want it but I think seitan makes the best cold cuts. Spice heavily, cut it very thin with a meat slicer, and it’s flexible and salty+savory like lunchmeat. Makes great sandwiches.

Maybe pro-Palestine marches have potential in Europe. This has not been the case in America. In Chicago, pro-Palestine protests drew huge crowds a year ago (I didn’t photograph the crowd size, but it was maybe 5k+ people and several city blocks long when marching). They were held every weekend for months. The accomplishment: City Council passed, via narrowly choreographed vote, a symbolic resolution supporting a ceasefire. No banning of weapons manufacturers, no BDS legislation, nothing real. By late 2024, marches have dwindled to the same 300-500 lefties all trying to get new blood to join their party, with perfunctory police presence since they don’t pose a threat. I don’t have a coherent theory of when peaceful protests are a useful weapon and when they are not. Maybe a demonstration, saying “hey we have thousands of organized people and although we’re peaceful today we won’t be if you don’t meet our demands”, would be powerful. But without an organized left that’s an empty threat; in the US, protests largely serve as a pressure relief valve. Activists say that you can use the “momentum” of protests to make material change. But that’s shown itself to be false for 60 years - if a protest movement has no potential unless it redirects itself, it has no “momentum” to redirect. Joining a crowd of strangers doesn’t build solidarity or community any more than Lollapalooza.

There are some losers who might go to riots and solidify what they are starting to believe (I did in 2020). But overall, as workers develop class consciousness, they will search for methods that work. They want to fight for real. In the US, we’ve seen protest movement after protest movement come and go; anybody paying attention knows that going out in the street to shout at cops doesn’t get anything done. I think the intermediate steps between 0 and sabotaging weapons factories have to be actually-meaningful small wins. In the US, that is probably workplace organizing. For instance at my last job I got everyone to agree not to accept Israeli VC money. Lots of unions have put forward pro-Palestine resolutions of various strength, and UAW did some political strikes in California. The next steps would be, as you said, collective workplace actions that materially oppose the war like refusing to ship weapons.

There are some protests that might work as stepping stones. For instance, the Animal Rights Collective in Chicago (part of CAFT) has been doing small protests in front of clothing stores, only going away once the stores promise to stop selling fur. That works, albeit slowly, but these protests attract only a couple dozen dedicated activists. It’s the way an already-existing organization exerts force, not a mass tactic that will grow the organization. The reason is because these protests are “inefficient”: they don’t actually make use of the participants’ power as workers. It’s just brute force of determination; there’s no path for mass growth.

Since the Greens have never breached 5% (highest 2.7% for Nader), would that mean they have never received FEC funding for their presidential campaigns?

I know that Greens are in local offices obviously, that work is good, but I don’t understand how specifically running Stein is required for “down ticket greens to be eligible to be on the ballot” as Infamousbit said. Seems to me that she’s running for the same reason PSL is.

I appreciate the talk about the importance of political violence; it is so so hard to shake the mainstream left reliance on nonviolent mass “protest” (only effective in very specific conditions which largely no longer exist in the US) vs acts of actual resistance like collective action at work or direct action against uniquely vulnerable targets.

If protests were not effective, then they would have fizzled out already

But this is not true. I think that despite explicitly rejecting this line of thought you’ve accidentally gotten caught. I think that American-style street protests do nothing, and so the ruling class only lightly represses them in order to provide a safe outlet for discontent and ultimate demoralization. For instance, did the massive protests against the Iraq war actually work? What has one year of protests against Israel’s genocide of Palestine actually accomplished? We are too quick to reach for protests when we have better weapons.

offline. join a party

She is running because she has to run for president in order for down ticket greens to be eligible to be on the ballot.

where can I read more about this? is this partisan ballots or something?

But for professional kitchens or other kinds of cooking that billions of people use open flames for? Get outta here. You’re going to tell the south American grandma who hasn’t left her town and has cooked with gas her whole life that she’s been brainwashed by the American oil and gas industry?

You know, a pretty decent cause of mortality in poor countries is women cooking over wood fires in confined spaces. Combustion is just not good for you, there’s really no way around it.

Also the idea that most people in the north can’t cook well enough for their tools to matter is laughable. That’s just your vulgar reaction to fetishism of high-class French cooking. What evidence could possibly support it? We can joke about the Brits eating like the Blitz is still going on but you can’t set up an objective ranking of cuisines.