quill7513

i don’t disagree. the american civil war is the tent pole event through which all other analysis of american history needs to be analyzed. certain lefty folks will tell you it’s the great depression but i think that’s fundamentally just examining american history through the lens of when the poverty of the southern tidewater finally reached the northern cities. yes, brown and black people were hit harder by the great depression, so the great depression is still a useful tent pole, however the missing context of why brown and black people didn’t have as many protections from poverty is very important, and that reason is that by not enforcing reckoning against the wealthy elites who enacted the civil war to continue owning people, every enforcement of poverty in the tidewater was allowed to repeat

the jerusalem cross on his chest is nearly exclusively got by either Georgian nationals or nazis.

i’ll let you figure out which he is

i even know a lot of people who cite Nixon as where our constitutional collapse started. laws only matter if they’re obeyed

https://deadpioneers.bandcamp.com/track/love-language

and that he carries a lot of weight in as the chairperson of one of the main actors?

legal systems in the British tradition have this tendency…

Geriatric Oligarchic Paedophiles

there’s a long history of cops making petty abuses of the power over others they’re granted, and of those additional powers not making their communities any safer. to me this headline reads as “most predictable thing imaginable has come to pass”

here’s my advice:

1. dismantle the surveillance state
2. abolish the institution of prison
3. abolish the police

A lot of what you’re arguing is tangential to what I was trying to say, but I’ll still go through it.

1. We were glad in NoVA that Spanberger won in an extremely conservative district in Northern Virgina in 2018. It was a relief compared to what was there before. The follow up in 2020 was also nice.
2. I’m not trying to say that she didn’t win by enough. I don’t really care about vote margins in electoral politics, I care about what politicians do in office to shift how people perceive the political process. Spanberger has been a consistent corporate vote. Better than the overt fascists. Still complicit in the erosion of our environmental and labor protections. She’s part of the false binary we find ourselves in in this country between overt hyperfascism and slow neoliberal fascism. We won’t know until we try it if a populist left wing candidate like a Zohran Mamdani or a Bernie Sanders could win in a general. Virginia hasn’t had an opportunity to do such a thing in my lifetime.
3. I also don’t think that the NYC populace is the same as Virginia. I think our left wing populism would look different from their left wing populism. I know this because I’ve experienced it first hand. The center of left wing life in SWVA is the Grange, the Mutual Aid Hub, and the Water Defender. In the urban centers the focus is much more on economic unions and labor unions for the factory and office worker. I’ve lived both lives, and have seen that organization efforts need to fall along different lines and put different focuses on confronting poverty. In the countryside you need to empower people to support eachother through their access to clean drinking water and growable food. In the urban centers you need to empower people to organize their people power to demonstrate to their bosses the ability to say “No.”
4. I missed my CWA chapter endorsing her. I didn’t know that the CWA endorsed her. That’s my mistake. Most unionists did tend to vote for her anyway because Winsome Earle-Sears was an overt fascist. You will receive no argument from me. But this was the first time in my life that the unions refused to endorse either candidate. That’s HUGE

5. If she ran unopposed in the primary, why didn’t Progressives put up a challenger? Is it HER fault she ran unopposed? That’s EXACTLY the organization failure I was trying to point out. Democracy is not a single event that occurs at the ballot box in November. Even the bourgious electoral form of democracy practiced in the United states requires participation 2-3 times a year to get the best possible outcome, but moreover, it requires dedicating time to go door to door to talk to people about candidates. You get more enthusiasm to do that when people are enthusiastic about the candidates. I haven’t seen that in Virginia in a decade. No one trusts any of our politicians and people dedicated to the value of democratic values have been much more focused on community organization with their neighbors. It’s been a monumental shift, and one I’ve very much seen accelerate in the past 4 years since the western regions of the state were devestated by hurricane helene along with our North Carolinian and West Virginian brethren, with many people slowly viewing themselves less as residents of any of our states or border states, and more as being parts of the cultural communities we exist in. The people of Bluefield, Tazewell, and Boone have more in common that their political representation reflects. So why do we even pay attention to the state borders when our real connections are through our food and our water? More and more people want representation that reflects this, and if Democrats don’t run a socialist who reflects this, they risk losing to a national-socialism who does Definition of fascism by Seth Tobocman. If we are to resist fascism, we must acknowledge how it takes hold. The “Virginia wants corporate dems” narrative undermines our ability to assess and resist our standing when increasingly there is a boot on our nets.

6. Not being Winsome Earle-Sears is not clear policy value. Virginians like some of her policy positions, but some of her policy positions are WILDLY unpopular, and as a result she has become increasingly unpopular. We do need to acknowledge that there is an element of misogyny driving her unpopularity. I renounce anyone who roots their criticisms of the 67th governor in her gender. Fuck that and fuck off if that’s you (not you who I’m replying to, obviously, but I know there’s a chance someone’s reading this hating her for her gender). I’ll state my stance that our last good governor was Francis Harrison Pierpont. Spanberger is a better governor than Youngkin, McDonnel, or Warner up to this point, but we do have to acknowledge what the specific issues with her governorship have been
7. You think I don’t know the short sessions and long sessions are completely insane!? THEY’RE COMPLETELY INSANE!! “Oh it’s to avoid a permanent professional class of politicians from running the state” bull fucking shit, the result is representatives that spend somewhere between 1 and 3 months a year doing anything, and the rest of the year schmoozing. I fuckin’ hate it. I’ll have to take your word for it on that it was the centrist dems mainly saying she scuttled collective bargaining and environmental protections we’d been hopeful on. That was the feedback we got from our union endorsed representative and from multiple environmental groups in our valley who spend a lot of time talking to representatives, senators, and anyone else who will listen to that we’re tired of the arsenic in the New River, so it was the understanding I had taken away from this past session.

Abigail Spanberger won a tight race against an overt fascist without endorsements from any of the most powerful political blocs in virginia, like the UMWA, USW, UAW, or CWA. she also ran virtually unopposed in the democratic primary. she is not an example of someone who won because of the value of centrist politics. she’s currently wildly unpopular for vetoing populist left wing bills from the long session (60 days) without providing input during the session about what she wanted. the next, and final session of this legislature is a short session (30 days) and none of the legislaters knew what she wants or needs to pass environmental protections, labor protections, or affordability measures as Virginia experiences a housing crisis.

so.

no.

this is not a good counter example to Mamdani, but instead a good example of exactly why no one trusts corporate dems or ex-CIA agents