And yet they're fighting the exact same enemies. If the LGB accept the erasure of Trans rights now, they are just going to be the next in line for the gallows. Trans exclusionary LGB groups are literally just shouting: "No, shoot THEM first!" as the firing squads take aim. The rights all of them are asking for and the rights that are now being taken away are the very very simple, basic right to exist. To be themselves without bothering anyone else or being bothered by anyone else.
Domestic consequences of the 2024 US presidential election: the quickening
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Yeah, trying to convince people who have a class interest that they don't have a class interest is one of the most powerful weapons in the class war that the rich have never actually stopped fighting.
See also: Division of the working class by race when working class people have many many more interests in common with each other than they have with the rich of any race.
See also: Division of the working class by race when working class people have many many more interests in common with each other than they have with the rich of any race.
Eh, this goes both ways. One of the reasons Sanders' 2016 campaign was unsuccessful was he tried to argue that racial issues were less important than class issues, and if the class issues were addressed, the racial issues would go away. Black voters were, shall we say, unconvinced. (No, this is not an invitation to relitigate 2016, god forbid; it's just an example of how focusing on class to the detriment of other characteristics is an insufficiently complete analysis.)
I think it's more helpful to include class as part of an intersectional analysis, in which characters such as race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and economic class combine in complex ways to situate people in the social pecking order.
Same enemies, but wildly different tactics. Gay advocacy has a message of equality and "sameness" : a gay man is like any other man, except he loves men, a lesbian woman is like any other woman except she loves women. And gay love ... you get the idea.
And thus end to legal discrimination and marriage was won across the western world and beyond.
Some fringe gay movements wanted to be revolutionary or whatever and some even were against gay marriage because they saw it as capitulation. They were sidelined.
As I see it, or as a big part of the population see it, the trans right movement is closely associated with a movement to redefine sex and gender (not as a political / philosophical study field but as a practical, day to day question). Our ennemies just had to reframe all this into "they want to erase "man" and "woman". See a famous English novelist...
Is it true ? Well, the trans right movement certainly didn't succeed in preventing this narrative from taking hold and becoming the majority view.
And thus end to legal discrimination and marriage was won across the western world and beyond.
Some fringe gay movements wanted to be revolutionary or whatever and some even were against gay marriage because they saw it as capitulation. They were sidelined.
As I see it, or as a big part of the population see it, the trans right movement is closely associated with a movement to redefine sex and gender (not as a political / philosophical study field but as a practical, day to day question). Our ennemies just had to reframe all this into "they want to erase "man" and "woman". See a famous English novelist...
Is it true ? Well, the trans right movement certainly didn't succeed in preventing this narrative from taking hold and becoming the majority view.
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Ultimately though it's convincing people that they have class interests that matters, because if they believe they have a class interest they will act together on it.
That's why the tactic here and with economic class is to attempt to dissolve the idea that there is a class interest shared by all LGBT+ people.
(Race in America is, of course, a battle that needs to be fought on both fronts because it is going to be a lot more effort to convince the white working and middle classes that they have class interests with their Black counterparts than it ever would be to convince Black people that they are working class.)
Yeah, I'm following the r/LeopardsAteMyFace, and once in a while there's a post of someone just so incredibly oblivious you wonder how they figured out how to vote.
Like people who have undocumented people in their close family, and are now suddenly realizing they are ALSO covered by the "Kick out all the Mexicans" rhetoric. It's just amazing that people don't take 5 seconds to wonder "How might this affect me?". I mean it's a given they don't give a shit about how it affects people outside their immediate circle, but they apparently didn't even think how it would affect them PERSONALLY. Just mindblowingly dumb. And/or racist of course.
Wrong use of tense. The fight to recognise gay marriage is currently won, but that's a temporary state. As the US discovered when Roe vs Wade was overturned, no battle for rights is ever truly won. It's always a temporary victory in a fight that can only ever end in defeat. That is, if it ever ends, it's when rights are destroyed. The only way to maintain a right is to always fight.
Trans people have lost big time. They are being erased in the US right now. Gays and lesbians are next in the crosshairs of the "Christian" conservatives. If they don't fight, they'll be consigned to the same fate. This cancer of hatred is spreading across the world.
There is no settled law, there are no settled rights. It can all be overturned.
One would almost think you'd actually make a Constitution that enumerates such rights clearly and definitively. Perish the thought, of course.
nobody is going to starve for lack of fresh fruit and vegetables. core calories for all of the US can come from the high automated grain farms in the midwest. There's so much of it, we mostly feed it to animals in concentrated feeding operations so we can have our meat-heavy diet. We even turn a bunch of it into fuel.
I think its great that some people, out of passion and love, want to grow food at that small scale. I love having the space and resources to have a garden for my own fresh fruit and vegetables. But, it is backbreaking labor that will destroy your body.
I don't want those to be luxuries that are only available to the rich. Like you pointed out, there's no way for everyone to afford those things without the immiseration that is migrant crop labor.
The options, as I see it, are accepting very expensive tomatoes, accepting the human suffering, or finding a way to automate mass production. in my utopian vision of fully automated luxury communism, fusion-powered greenhouses full of hydroponic tomato plants provide enough for 10 billion people to all have a perfect caprese salad anytime they want.
Sure, and I'd really like to have a pony, but in the meantime, I don't see the point of continuing a conversation based on wishful thinking and blowing rainbows out of someone's ass. We're in the domestic consequences thread, not a Lounge thread about unrealistic fantasies.
My expectation is they will try and replace the undocumented immigrant workforce in agriculture with a much larger prison workforce. Basically, try to scale up the prison to plate process that already occurs. I'm sure many folks who are here illegally will be "convicted" and forced into similar jobs that they were previously doing.
I don't expect this to be particularly successful though. Putting aside how monstrous this would be the debate on the economic efficiency of slave-labor vs wage-labor has been answered fairly conclusively.
I don't expect this to be particularly successful though. Putting aside how monstrous this would be the debate on the economic efficiency of slave-labor vs wage-labor has been answered fairly conclusively.
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Not to mention the additional costs of using prisoner labor. Security, transportation, healthcare..
"Healthcare" lol
Somehow we’re going to have to unravel the mythology that we get some efficiency gains by having a whole class of people whose role in society is to do violence to laborers. It isn’t true of prison labor, slaves, feudal peasants, or Sparta’s helots. But there are segments of our society that admire the people doing the violence in all of those cases for some bizarre reason.
The problem with slave ownership is that the people who own the slaves actually do profit and live pretty good lives. It's the slaves and the non-slave owning individuals whose labor is devalued by "free" labor that end up paying for the aristocracy. So there is a motivation for slavery - if you get to be part of the aristocracy, and not on the bottom.
Yeah, all of this. The slavers do pay with their humanity, metaphorically speaking, but they seem to think it’s an ok bargain to be aristocrats.
I get that we live in a capitalist society, and the system has honestly been pretty good to me. But there are things much, much bigger than money or profits or “class” at stake here.
I don’t even believe in souls, and I’m still not willing to sacrifice mine on this altar.
It is worst than that. They are going to charge governments (pay by tax payers like you) for keeping the slaves. Remember, private prisons is a for-profile organizations. Ever government run prisons contract a lot of functions out.
In this connection there's a GREAT YouTube video I watched a couple of years ago that details how what was essentially slavery was continued well after the passage of the 13th Amendment (and no, it wasn't "just" sharecropping, despite the thumbnail). This will blow your mind--this system did not end till the US was in WW2:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4kI2h3iotA
No I understand that much, it was meant to be implicit in my post - that our food economy has become so dependent on cheap labor that the prices have become untenable without exploitation. I live in southern Wisconsin, we have local CSAs and dairies right down the road from us. As you mentioned, that's simply not an option for everyone, though.
My point was more about how this is such a universally accepted thing that a lot of people, and especially the media, don't even think of from a moral standpoint because that's just the way things are here - we (and largely the media) talk about how deporting laborers will make things harder for the rest of us and don't give a thought or consideration to the human cost; they are still seen as basically an abstract, a given - and I think that's kind of a big red flag of just how dystopian and far out of touch with our own humanity we are as a culture, even before the current accelerated shitshow. It's more about how we talk about things like deportations and grocery prices and what we seemingly intentionally DON'T bring into these conversations because it's too uncomfortable - just because it's necessary doesn't make it not evil. But that's getting even more into the weeds about it and probably deserves its own thread.
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Point completely understood.
Thing is, the prices you've listed above for community-supported expensive agriculture have me smiling .
Ground beef here costs ~US$7.70 per pound at the absolute cheapest supermarket in the country, not from choice cuts. Chicken legs ~$5.15 (*).
But that's before taking salaries into account... Average wage here is 46% that of the US (as of 2023, using PPP, before taxes), and income tax here is higher for medium+ earners.
Once you take into account earning power, everyone here is already paying more than the prices you're thinking of as high.
So something has to give, right? Many people here don't eat meat every day, and when they do, it's cheaper, long-cooking cuts stretched with lots of vegetables. Chicken is far cheaper than beef, as most beef (86%) is imported. Internal chicken & beef organs (livers, hearts, kidneys etc.) are also widely consumed. For religious reasons, the vast majority of the population here (Jewish & Muslim) don't eat pork, and many Jews won't eat shellfish, so they're not significant food sources.
The US is #2 in the world for amount of meat consumed per capita per year, ~129kg; EU average is about half that, 67kg.
So, if indeed the Trump admin will not allow agricultural migrants (illegal or not, or even just temporary Gastarbeiter to work the fields and the rest of the agri labor positions), and will impose tariffs on food imports (Argentinian & Brazilian, the likely source of inexpensive beef) -- something will have to give in the US as well.
People will need to spend a far higher % of income on food, and/or change their eating habits.
There have been plenty of Ars threads in the Boardroom in the past explaining to people who've been living beyond their means how to reduce their food budget. A large % of USians will now need to do this.
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(*) Oh, and we get virtually no out-of-season fruits and vegetables; their import is blocked by the government (and always has been). No problem with tomatoes, as with greenhouses they grow year-around. But no out-of-season grapes, or citrus, or artichokes. It does mean that when deciding to cook a meal, you need to take into account what's in season.
Labor issues famously create pressure to automate farming and tech keeps getting better. Humans should not need to do manual harvesting but
cheap labor reduces pressure on the industry to adapt. Corn used to be labor-intensive but mechanization ended that problem in the US.
Opponents of using prisoners should advocate mechanization. Even prisoners can't work 24/7 without sleep, food and water.
While delicate crops are more difficult to harvest by machine that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Nifty automated fruit harvester:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPjTmyT4a8w
Tomato picker:
View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsZJWyMVBtY
As stated upthread, robots are not cheaper than exploited human labor, so expect the capitalists to exploit human labor. This is why I expect immigrants to stop being deported and start being herded into work camps.
I think we’re all expecting bad things to happen. But it is still worth pushing back on the false choice between exploitation and starvation. We’re doing the cruelty on purpose not because we have no other option.
Not to keep pushing against the wind here, but let's not forget that anyone whose primary news source is Fox News or any related infospace (segments of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc) are swimming in a flood of disinformation, muffling or even silencing the worst parts, amplifying the distorted parts, and sometimes outright lying to them. It's very very hard to get these people out of that info-bubble.
It's a false choice indeed because survival foods are not at all at stake. No one needs most crops which are manually harvested to avoid starvation, but our brilliant masses lose their minds over trifles. Fruit, lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, melons, strawberries, mushrooms etc are not survival necessities, but moderns forget you don't need to enjoy food to live.
Simple minds are easily corrupted by convenience.
It's effectively impossible. They cannot be rewired because that bubble is their entire identity, like the Southern attachment to Lost Cause propaganda. They're not intelligent enough to break free and intelligence is luck not choice.
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You also have to figure out what to do with displaced workers, if you automate a lot of agricultural labor. It's not pleasant work, most Americans are not willing to do it, but there are people here -today- who do the jobs and scrape some money to get by that way.
I don't debate that long-term, shifting human labor to automation is economically, culturally, and humanely the superior choice.
But in the short-to-medium term, the current workers are gonna starve. Retraining is potentially possible (to do what?) but in practice the reasons people do those jobs today for poverty wages is they have little education, few job prospects and, in many cases, no permission to work legally. The reasons don't evaporate at the same time the jobs do. And it's not like the social safety net, which already doesn't help undocumented people much, is going to get better.
I guess the people in question will be herded to the work camps "for their own benefit." After all, work sets you free*!
* My grandmother was enslaved by the Nazis and forced to work at an airplane factory as a maid for other workers. And this was after she survived Auschwitz.
I don't debate that long-term, shifting human labor to automation is economically, culturally, and humanely the superior choice.
But in the short-to-medium term, the current workers are gonna starve. Retraining is potentially possible (to do what?) but in practice the reasons people do those jobs today for poverty wages is they have little education, few job prospects and, in many cases, no permission to work legally. The reasons don't evaporate at the same time the jobs do. And it's not like the social safety net, which already doesn't help undocumented people much, is going to get better.
I guess the people in question will be herded to the work camps "for their own benefit." After all, work sets you free*!
* My grandmother was enslaved by the Nazis and forced to work at an airplane factory as a maid for other workers. And this was after she survived Auschwitz.
Only if you erase history. After all, historically, gay rights and the rights of a drag queen have always been associated.
Arguably, it hasn't really ended past WW2 either, first with Jim Crow and then with the War on Drugs.
/r/fednews stories of the federal workers laid off illegally fired today, on Valentine's Day, are fucking tragic.
Sounds like the unions are conducting surveys of the victims to determine common factors. Among other things, the surveys ask about race and party affiliation.
Federal HR departments screened, hired, and trained 200,000 federal employees only to summarily terminate them. 'Efficient' is not the word that springs to mind.
Sounds like the unions are conducting surveys of the victims to determine common factors. Among other things, the surveys ask about race and party affiliation.
Federal HR departments screened, hired, and trained 200,000 federal employees only to summarily terminate them. 'Efficient' is not the word that springs to mind.
Not to mention the reality that those undocumented workers who were earning $1 or $2 per hour laboring in the fields will now be inmate workers laboring in the fields for 10 cents per hour--a boon for all those MAGA farmers! /s
That slow walk seems to of turned into a jog, or perhaps a fall down some steps.
Kind of a defenestration really.
The thing that's puzzling me the most in all of this: Why the heck is nobody protesting?
Your new President who is most probably a Russian asset is gutting the government agencies, threatening to annex some foreign countries completetely (Canada), and others in parts (Denmark/Greenland, Panama Canal). He starts trade wars with practically everyone, raises tarrifs in a way not seen since Mercantilism went out of fashion a few centuries ago. He alienates all previous allies and has practically killed NATO and is in the process of gift-wrapping Ukraine to Putin.
It's been only a month and it already looks like the US and the world will probably never be the same again. Sadly.
If Tom Clancy or any other author of that type had written a book with this plot, people would've probably criticized it for beeing way too unrealistic. And now it's happening live on TV, everybody can see it.
And absolutely nobody in the US seems to care. You're a nation of over 300 million people, at least somebody somewhere should be worried enough to start a protest, right? But there's nothing.
Do people just not care? Do they actually like what is happening? Are they worried but lazy?
Your new President who is most probably a Russian asset is gutting the government agencies, threatening to annex some foreign countries completetely (Canada), and others in parts (Denmark/Greenland, Panama Canal). He starts trade wars with practically everyone, raises tarrifs in a way not seen since Mercantilism went out of fashion a few centuries ago. He alienates all previous allies and has practically killed NATO and is in the process of gift-wrapping Ukraine to Putin.
It's been only a month and it already looks like the US and the world will probably never be the same again. Sadly.
If Tom Clancy or any other author of that type had written a book with this plot, people would've probably criticized it for beeing way too unrealistic. And now it's happening live on TV, everybody can see it.
And absolutely nobody in the US seems to care. You're a nation of over 300 million people, at least somebody somewhere should be worried enough to start a protest, right? But there's nothing.
Do people just not care? Do they actually like what is happening? Are they worried but lazy?
Well, we just had 7 DOJ officials resign in protest; the Democrats held the Senate floor for 30 hours to filibuster and protest RFK Jr.'s appointment; dozens of lawsuits have been filed, resulting in several preliminary injunctions; and there have been numerous protests around the country. Not to mention plenty of people on Ars repeatedly asking why everyone else isn't doing something. So it's not accurate to say that nobody is protesting.
As for why there isn't more, there's been a fair amount of discussion in the resistance thread. My personal theory is twofold: 1) large portions of the country rose up and protested throughout Trump's first administration, to virtually no effect, which likely leaves people rightfully doubting the efficacy of protesting; and 2) Trump won the popular vote this time around, so it's harder (though not impossible, as voter suppression and such are a thing) to argue that he's an illegitimate usurper, and easier to conclude that what he's doing is what the American people collectively actually want.
