"Actually the recording is fake or Epstein was just saying that to sabotage Trump."
My friends absolutely will not budge on their liberalism so I barely talk with them anymore.
My job requires me to visit people’s homes every day. At least once a day someone remarks on the niceness of the weather. It takes so much self restraint on my part to just be like “yeah.” Halloween where I live is always noticeably and sometimes even shockingly cold. Not today.
The trotskyist who helped a lot to radicalize me (I later became an ML thanks to hexbear) got a good job with the teamsters and is now just a standard liberal as far as I can tell.
I think all of us were assuming that Biden would lose in 2020. I know I was.
Harris is already exterminating every last person in Palestine. How can Trump exterminate them more?
Gotta get me some BRICS bux.
I feel like if all he did was film himself working at McDonald’s from now until election day he would win in a landslide.
I used to be like this in 2016 too. I listened obsessively to the 538 podcast and read everything on their website. Then, on election day, Trump won the electoral college while Hillary won the popular vote. 538 had never covered this possibility. I know because I really did follow them obsessively for months. This world of r/politics headlines has only the most tenuous connection to the actual material world. If you follow liberalism closely, sooner or later it leads you over a cliff.
I laughed when I saw trump at McDonald’s at first but then I realized that it was a pretty good move from his campaign (it makes him more relatable) and probably the first time he has ever worked a real job in his life.
I worked as a dishwasher in high school and college. My first job was as a bus boy, and the restaurant owner said, after the first two days, that these days had been an unpaid training period, something she had not mentioned until then. She stole my pay from those days, and then I quit. This was an excellent introduction to capitalism, although it took me another fifteen years to figure out that this system was actually the problem. I think the difference between me and a lot of westerners is that although I'm a slow learner, I do actually learn. Westerners don't seem to learn anything at all, except how to wag their tails when their bourgeois masters toss them a bone from the capitalist banquet of stolen labor.
Anyway
I worked overseas in East Asia as an English teacher and university instructor for years. Started a family and we made the huge mistake of moving back to the USA (I was still a lib). My spouse is a nurse and ended up getting a good job after we were both unemployed and living on our savings and family assistance for a year. I was already a Berner by then but it was definitely radicalizing to go from having excellent universal health care in East Asia to having no fucking health care at all in America (with two small kids) while hearing constantly from white liberal boomers on Facebook that universal health care is wrong and terrible and evil and impossible. My whole family had been using it for years by then!
I got involved in local democratic politics, another huge mistake I've discussed here multiple times. It only became a problem when I started winning elections. I voted to defund the police and the sheriff himself screamed in my face, three feet away from me. I started thinking that my family was in danger and that no one would stand up for us or protect us here. The police would run me off the road one late night, there would be an article in the paper about it, and that would have been the end of me. What would I have achieved, except making my kids fatherless? So I quit.
I was unemployed and publishing novels that made no money for years, trying to get a teaching job based on my extensive experience even though I don't have the qualifications the state requires, and anytime an employer googles me they see that I hate the police thanks to a few articles written by a couple of shitheads in our wonderful local family neighborhood newspapers. I worked as a substitute teacher before the pandemic and really enjoyed it. The kids were actually great, only some teachers were weird (the principals are often unbearable in countless ways). Last January I ended up taking an oil burner technician class, among the hardest experiences of my life. It was free and paid for with covid money. I made it through the class and got a job, and have been doing this shit for seven months now. I'm days from getting my journeyman's license, and have hundreds of pages in a book I'm writing about going from white collar to blue collar work. It's still a bullshit job, just a different kind of bullshit. All of these fucking oil boilers and furnaces should be dismantled; instead, my job is maintaining them. My coworkers refuse to unionize even though all the oil companies around here are desperate for workers, so that's cool. Once I have my journeyman's license, I can do everything except installations (which I don't want to do anyway since they are so amazingly unethical), but this also makes me nervous because a lot of the work is really advanced for me. My employer has been honest and fair so far (as much as capitalists can be) but my pay is still pathetic (I'm supposed to get a raise to $24/hr in a few days) and I really, really don't want to do on-call work, so I might end up changing employers soon. I would rather just work for myself, since that's where the big bucks are, but I still need help from people who know so much more than me, and my license also requires a master to sign off on it. The feudal guilds live on!