Leonard Pierce

@leonardpierce.bsky.social

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Marxist, wife guy, ne'er-do-well. Concerned with words, generally. Chicago-based eating enthusiast. Possibly Jewish? Crime, baseball, communism.

Posts Replies Media

As noted, I'm bailing on social media for a while. I may shut down my website, too, as it's not doing me any goddamn good. Before I fuck off and shove my head full of LSD for a week, though, you can read this if you care to. Love to all you friends and comrades.

Thirteen Thoughts as Darkness Fallswww.leonardpierce.com I. What Is and What Never Should Be It can be very easy, living where and how we live, to lose sight of what we refer to, and even then in quotes ironic or otherwise, as reality. We are, as people,…

I think it’s time I left social media behind for a while. Back when I’m less agitated, ha ha. Last word for now: huge congratulations to our new and returning Chicago DSA officers, including @acabcalloway.bsky.social. You all do so much under such rough circumstances. dsausa.org/join

Join DSA. Become a member today.dsausa.org Democratic socialists have an historic opportunity and responsibility to play a central role in continuing the political revolution for the long term. As a democratic, grassroots organization, DSA is ...

Reposted by

Leonard Pierce

Why on earth would I comply with the Project 2025 freaks? Pride needs to be 10-100 times bigger next year fwiw

I hope we all enjoyed our last Pride month in the US. Project 2025 will put an end to it

Reply to

mrfengi.bsky.social

Here is what I will say: you and I both know a lot of liberals do not want to be taught. You don't have to speculate; you can see it. We need them to win, but if they actively oppose us, we gotta say so. It is usually easy to see pretty quickly when someone just doesn't know vs. doesn't want to.

Even in a union setting, if there is someone finking to the boss, or shit-talking the union, or saying "Hey let's all just work harder instead of making waves", you have to learn how to deal with that. Sometimes it's by kindness. Sometimes it isn't. We learn how to fight in the midst of fighting.

Reply to

mrfengi.bsky.social

I know all that, and frankly, I'm a little insulted given what I know you know about my work and my history that you feel you have to remind me.

The recruiter offers positives, of course! But he also has to make you understand the boss is not your friend and you have to learn to use power against him. Teachers have to be kind but they also have to be firm. If a student won't learn or makes the same mistakes you have to deal with that.

If someone in your family is an addict, that's not their fault. They need love and attention and care. But after you lose the house you eventually have to get them into treatment, or take their credit cards, or whatever you have to do. You have to learn when to be kind and when to be direct.

Not everyone responds to the same kind of education. We have a population so brainwashed with capitalist and imperialism propaganda that most people can't even articulate the concepts even though they constrain their whole lives. They won't learn on their own; they don't even know they need to.

We can't move the needle on socialism if all we do is value-neutral chat sessions that just tell everyone "hey we know you have a choice in ideologies, thank you for considering us". We have to name enemies and articulate alternatives -- things that crucially, the Dems and GOP absolutely do not do.

Reply to

mrfengi.bsky.social

You can do that. Millions have, year after year. The thing is, I don't believe in 'human nature' or 'human instinct'. And if I did, I might note that it is also human instinct to drink water, but if the well is poisoned, at a certain point, you have to stop following that instinct or you die.

This is not new, not even a little. It's the same pattern that has been going on forever, and particularly since the Clinton era. People may make bad decisions for understandable reasons, but eventually, they have to stop making them. The bosses have already figured this out and they rely on it.

It might make us feel better about ourselves to keep being nice and kind and shepherding people through repeated bad choices. But I think that's an abdication of our role as socialists, whose primary job is to make more socialists. We're not doing that. You can't learn if you're asleep in class.

Reposted by

Leonard Pierce

Folks we all are guilty of armchair QBing campaigns but I think it's pretty uncontroversial to assert that a statement about a SCOTUS ruling that does not talk about either the ruling or SCOTUS is not how to play this.

At this point we need to erect a huge neon sign across from the White House that lights up every time they issue a statement like this and says "WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT"

Lot of people in the mindset that they can still win this one, just "we gotta re-elect Biden and then win every election and also win more elections" It's like people saying "If I just keep playing three-card monte I'll HAVE to win one eventually". You will not!

The game is rigged. If your guys eke out a meaningful win they'll change it again in their favor You can call them out on hypocrisy as many times as you want and as long as you keep playing their game, you're not gonna find the lady. "Try again maybe you'll get her next time"

This isn't doomerism. It's the exact opposite. You're not gonna beat the system using the system that you have to beat. You're not gonna fix capitalism with two capitalist parties. You might as well be yelling at someone on a movie screen. We have to organize and fix it ourselves. No shortcuts.

Really good day to understand the meaning of “a system is what it produces”

THE NEWS: Six people just decided the president can do whatever ANALYSTS: Actually this is fair because Democrats can be just as authoritarian as Republicans LIBERALS: Imagine if we lost this democracy

The Political History of America, 2014-2024

Reply to

David_j_roth

All part of the grand tradition my man

Reply to

Great Boo’s Up 🇵🇸 ✊🏽

This is the liberal position, not mine.

I know I'm being a tedious fucking bore today but the way people just accept as eternal and permanent the state of our obviously wrecked political system. It really plays up the near-total lack of political education we get in America, especially as it concerns imperialism and capitalism

The US government has changed in a major way three times and in a minor way in half a dozen. Governments have changed all over the world hundreds of times. No country's government is unchangeable. Describing a factual but temporary, contingent way as political 'reality' is a dispiriting error

You don't have to imagine how this ends. Everyone told the abolitionists that their position was too extreme and the reality was either partial slavery or total slavery. The German government figured it was better to let the Nazis into their fragile coalition than listen to the communists.

Everything is forever until it isn't. Every form of government, and every government that employed that form, assumed it would go on forever. None of them lasted. The FIRST STEP is to start believing a broken system doesn't have to last forever, and then doing what you can to stop supporting it.

It's hard. You may lose. You may never see the system replaced, and if you do, the replacement might be bad or short-lived. But if you don't try, that's YOU not doing anything. You're just letting bosses push you around and make you think you can't win, just accept bad or worse every time. I won't.

Reply to

Patrick Fessenbecker

Biden doing a kind-of genocide and Trump maybe doing a full-on genocide just shows you how indefensible the system is. If they're both going to do terrible things, that's a reality, but it's not one whose underlying logic you have to support. Governments lose legitimacy when no one supports them.