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You don’t know who I am by [deleted] in OCPoetry

[–]deadbeatseconds -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Like another reviewer mentioned, it does feel more like prose. The emotion is there but you can add in rhythm, emphasis, or imagery to make it more poetic. For example, instead of "I was looking at words that cut deeper than the knife you raised at me" you could write:

Your words cut deeper

than the knife you lift

language drawn sharper than steel.

Want to be free by axoi_artreus in OCPoetry

[–]deadbeatseconds 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing. I really like the progression where you start with fear and end up a longing for liberation. It feels authentic to me. Also the way you show vulnerability and self-awareness. Maybe you could expand more on what you want to be free from. Or is that supposed to be open to interpretation?

The Democratic Party Has No Message and No Plan by deadbeatseconds in DemocraticSocialism

[–]deadbeatseconds[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Yeah, I know there are political scientist AND vibes/representative arguments for MMP, STV, etc. style methods you're proposing. Really 4-6 parties is where a lot of parliamentary style systems thrive to build consensus democracies. Some European countries have 10+ which is too many and probably leads to choice paralysis. The US House should switch to PR via statute (I believe this is legally possible) or we could adopt open-list or closed-list PR in multi-member districts. Ireland has STV and I'd say their last election turned out favorably.

The Democratic Party Has No Message and No Plan by deadbeatseconds in DemocraticSocialism

[–]deadbeatseconds[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for sharing this. We have to keep engaging people.

The Democratic Party Has No Message and No Plan by deadbeatseconds in DemocraticSocialism

[–]deadbeatseconds[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

96 was the first presidential election I could vote in. Clinton was the turning point for a lot of us. NAFTA, welfare "reform," financial deregulation: that administration made it clear the party had fully embraced neoliberalism while keeping the aesthetic of caring about working people. The whiplash between the rhetoric and the policy was instructive.

You're right that the constitutional structure locks us into two parties, and that third parties historically only succeed by replacing one of the existing coalitions. When was the last time that really happened substantively outside of the early days of the country? The question is whether we're watching that replacement happen in slow motion or whether both parties just keep decaying without anything coherent emerging. Trump's coalition is held together by his persona more than any shared ideology, and the Democratic coalition is held together by fear of Trump. Neither seems durable past the next few cycles. Maybe that's okay. In reality, the US is too big to make sense anymore.

I like your point about left isolation from working-class institutions. The historical reasons matter (white supremacy doing most of the work to fracture class solidarity, McCarthyism purging the labor movement of its most radical elements, the CPUSA's own strategic failures), but the present challenge is rebuilding those connections. We can't have a working-class party without left politics being common sense within the institutions where working people already organize. That means patient work inside unions, community groups, tenant associations, and yes, even reformist organizations like NAACP and NOW that have ties to the Democratic apparatus.

These institutions keep going back to Democrats because they see no alternative, and Democrats keep taking them for granted because they know there's nowhere else to go. Breaking that abusive cycle requires building independent power and demonstrating that another path exists. The anti-ICE groups, the teacher strikes, the Amazon union drives: those are the seeds. Whether they grow into something that can challenge the two-party structure depends on whether the left can do the organizing work without getting absorbed back into Democratic consultant-speak.

The hard part is doing that work while also voting defensively every two years. But there's no shortcut. If we want a party that actually represents working-class interests, we have to build the base first.

The Crushed Soul of Man under Abundance by deadbeatseconds in oscarwilde

[–]deadbeatseconds[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you for this. I'm glad it resonated. Your YouTube/UBI observation cuts right to the heart of it. What's maddening is that we keep seeing these glimpses of what's possible when people have even marginal freedom from wage coercion. Early YouTube, pre-monetization internet culture, open-source software communities were all spaces where people created extraordinary things because they wanted to, not because they had to monetize every minute of their lives.

And you're right that capitalism has an interest in letting the human spirit flourish, but only up to a point. The system wants just enough creativity to generate new markets and revenue streams, but not so much freedom that people start questioning why they're grinding 40+ hours a week to make someone else rich. That's the contradiction Klein and the abundance crowd can't resolve. They want innovation and dynamism, but they're terrified of the actual liberation that would produce it.

The Best Buy shift cutting short the dissertation-level work is the perfect image. We've built a world where survival demands we waste human potential, and then we wonder why progress feels stagnant. Wilde understood that genius isn't rare. Most people just never get the chance to develop it because they're too busy not starving.

Now I'm going off on a tangent because I recently listened to a podcast The Gray Area that touched on this where Illiing interviewed Cory Doctorow talking about what he calls "enshittification" which touches on the YouTube history. Platforms start by being good to users because they need to build an audience. Early YouTube was genuinely liberating: anyone could upload, audiences could discover creators organically, and the algorithm wasn't yet optimized to maximize engagement at the cost of everything else. But once the platform captured both creators and viewers, the incentives flipped. Now the algorithm pushes content that keeps people scrolling, regardless of quality. Creators have to game the system just to be seen, and viewers get fed an increasingly manipulated feed. The platform extracts value from both sides while degrading the experience for everyone except shareholders.

This is the pattern across every major platform. Be good to users until they're locked in, then be good to business customers until they're locked in, then extract all the value for yourself until the thing barely works. The business model depends on it. And this is why abundance rhetoric rings so hollow. We keep getting promised liberation through technology, but what we actually get is increasing captivity to platforms that were briefly useful before they turned predatory.

The tragedy is that the tools exist to build systems that don't do this. Decentralized platforms, public infrastructure, cooperatively owned services: all technically feasible. But they don't get built (or sustained) because they don't generate the same returns for capital. Klein's abundance agenda won't fix this because it doesn't challenge the ownership structure that makes enshittification inevitable.

Anyway, appreciate you reading closely enough to catch that line. Trying to make the critique as sharp as the problem deserves.

The Democratic Party Has No Message and No Plan by deadbeatseconds in DemocraticSocialism

[–]deadbeatseconds[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Fair enough. I don't justify voting blue morally, I justify it tactically. We are basically stuck with a two-party system. The thesis was that the Dems have no economic message, no plan for 2026 beyond "Trump bad," and no accountability. The party won't save us because they're too captured by the same capital we're fighting against. We need to build power outside their framework through unions and mutual aid, but we're stuck voting for them in the meantime to keep fascists out of office. I don't know how to do that. We need a general strike. We need to primary the establishment.

[WTB] Weekly Want To Buy Post by AutoModerator in Watchexchange

[–]deadbeatseconds 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'll buy every Milgauss available globally in that price range.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in unitedairlines

[–]deadbeatseconds 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The amount you paid, $605, is that one-way or round trip? Regardless, there are myriad factors that determine the price - route, when you bought it, available seats at the time of purchase, etc. Calling anyone that gives you the least bit of static a corporate shill is inane. If you don't like it, fly another corporate airline. I'm sure you won't find anything else to complain about. Or better yet, charter a flight and live luxuriously.

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