I have lights and ride in the dark already.

But we’re talking 11pm, if I get in a bad accident on a dark farm-to-market road I’ll just die. No one will see or hear me.

Also 20km is only 12.4 miles.

And I outright don’t believe riding on a steep icy hill with studs is like riding on asphalt. I’m sure it’s doable, I just don’t believe it’s easy or safe.

It’s a pretty hilly commute. Besides the ever present threat of being murdered in traffic (and this is a rural area, so traffic actually is a lesser concern), I have to contend with going up and down half a dozen steep slopes.

On ice in the dark.

I might just wreck my bike and freeze to death.

Do they do it for 20+ miles? In the dark?

Maybe they do.

I don’t want to die.

I do it about once a week. Plenty of time for audiobooks and podcasts!

My commute is pretty hilly, doesn’t sound like I’d have a good time on ice.

Does it really? I’d think they would help, but actually a non-issue? I’m skeptical.

Also getting sprayed by a passing asshole car showering me with slush+sand+road salt doesn’t sound great either.

If it weren’t for weather I wouldn’t have a car. Sure, 90 minutes by ebike is a serious time commitment, but I’d save so much money a year it makes sense as a part time job.

But fuck riding a bike on ice for two months lol

If driver’s licenses were invented today they’d be a public-private partnership.

The US is the fucking source for all this shit and it’s been the source since they flew bricks on military planes for the Contras and then later when they guarded the poppy fields for the Afghanistan puppet government. I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out Tren de Aragua was US backed at some point in the past if it isn’t US backed currently

How does “my logic” lead anyone to believe there has ever been a period of time that was perfect? The powerful have been oppressing us since we invented fucking agriculture and they started forming empires. All hitherto history is the history of class struggle, nothing has ever been perfect, what are you talking about?

Are you confusing me with someone else?

And now you’re insulting me.

What I’ve been taught? Who the fuck do you think taught me all this theory and history? Ebil gommunist brainwashing school?

I fucking read and read and read. Off the top of my head: How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, I read A Dying Colonialism, I read The Wretched of the Earth, I read Black Reconstruction, I read A People’s History of the United States, I read Shock Doctrine, I read Revolutionary Suicide, in fact I just read Empire of Borders and it really handily describes the global apartheid system our reforms rely on!

These are the basis for what I now understand about reformism within the imperial core. Reforms can only ever privilege a small segment of the working class above the workers in internal colonies and out in the periphery, they can not even help everyone under capitalism because then *where would capitalists get profits? Profit is theft, you can’t reform your way out of that.

Instead, reforms like the New Deal were a way to bribe that special privileged segment of the workers into opposing revolution. That’s it. They saw what happened in the USSR and it scared the shit out of them, so they bribed white workers into supporting capitalism and deputized them as enforcers. They can’t bribe everyone with reforms, so they just bribe enough to act as enforcers.

And now that the empire is in decay they’re running out of money to bribe us with. There are limits to growth, there is a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, you can’t escape this.

We can fight for reforms! But they should be the basis for further revolutionary aims, not be the end goal in and of themselves.

Working people lived prosperous dignified lives and did make improvements to government regulating business, as incomplete as it may have been.

The white ones did.

White prosperity has always been built on the back of colonialism and imperialism. Superprofits are stolen from the global South and from internal colonies within the global North (i.e. the periphery) to then be redistributed to a special privileged segment of the working class in the metropoles in order to prevent revolutionary consciousness.

Those reforms were bribes.

Now that the empire is in decay those superprofits are running out, so all those reforms can’t be sustained.

Calls for reform can be a way to rally workers to our cause, but reforms can’t be the limit of our goals because reforms under capitalism require rebuilding the empire. Call for reform, sure, but our only hope is to link arms with those imperialized and colonized people of the periphery and for the workers of the world to unite with revolutionary goals rather than purely reformist ones.

White workers in the metropoles don’t get to be privileged above workers in the underdeveloped periphery anymore. We hang together or we hang separately. That’s going to mean organizing undocument workers, organizing prison labor, organizing gig workers, organizing home healthcare workers, and organizing across borders.

Try to have some revolutionary optimism.

… bomb pops are five fucking dollars?

Work for whom?

They shouldn’t, but they shouldn’t get to keep the land their parents stole either.

There’s also the possibility of broader economic headwinds causing decreased youth employment, even if they haven’t hit older workers yet.

This is what I wish liberals could understand.

If liberals want to oppose Russia’s invasion, whatever, but they need to realize that NATO never wanted to actually repell the invasion. They wanted the war to become a quagmire and for Russia to never retreat, but get stuck in an unwinnable position until it collapsed.

The goal was never for Ukraine to win, the goal was to weaken Russia - even if they had to fight to the last Ukrainian. Now that the war is no longer weakening Russia its purpose is done and NATO will leave Ukraine with a ton of debt and nothing to show for it.

The result will be Western Ukraine becoming a neocolony that’s forced to pay back the debt it incurred during the war.

But instead of realizing what really happened, they’re going to retreat into another “stabbed in the back” myth.

I didn’t mean to imply they should be completely reeducated before they’re sent back to Europe, merely that they need to see with their own eyes what their colonialism has done. Right now they get a filtered view of what they are allowed to see, even soldiers are mostly behind screens to operate their tanks and terror drone army. They’re alienated from their crimes.

It won’t be good enough to just show videos and interviews, they’ll always believe it’s fake. They need a hands-on demonstration.

China’s task was actually easier than the denazification that Israelis need, and required totally different intervention. Extremists from Iraq and Syria are, honestly, far less damaged than the Zionists.

I’m being optimistic that we don’t need to kill them all, but the level of reeducation they need is basically unprecedented.

The first step isn’t to show them what they already support and know is happening (many of them having participated in it themselves). The first step is to comprehensively defeat them and dismantle the entire genocidal project.

Sorry, to clarify, I mean it’s the first step in their reeducation. This would presumably happen after Israel has been abolished and their Nazi army was defeated.

Without denazification (or mass executions I guess) they are always going to be a threat. You send these freaks back to Europe without reeducation and they’ll rally a fucking crusade behind them to “take back Jerusalem.”

The only options are to either make them not want to colonize anymore, so denazification, or to just kill them all.