First, left and right are relative terms. We are currently in a fight for survival. If you want to die on the hill of your purity test, you’re welcome to. I’ll collect allies, people who may have the right values but incomplete information, and do what I can, and we’ll see which approach is more effective for the people, the workers.

Then I’m happy to be wrong (fewer Nazi sympathizers is always better), and you have nothing to worry about. But that you consider a potentially over-broad definition of Nazism a major problem in this political climate suggests that even if you are antifascist, your priorities are skewed.

You mean besides the decades the US and USSR didn’t blow the entire world to pieces or even enter direct conflict, which would likely have killed millions more than the proxy wars that occurred with diplomatic intervention? I’m sorry, I just can’t take anyone who truly thinks that diplomacy is always useless seriously. It strongly suggests they’ve never read a history book.

Western MD, upstate NY, somewhere in Illinois that’s not Chicago, western Oregon that’s not Portland…just off the top of my head. Those are all decent places in terms of long-term climate change issues, as well. Basically, pick a blue state, go to a red rural part. Blue state laws, red state prices. I’d be careful long-term considering Michigan and Virginia safely blue, as well.

If you’re worried people will think you’re a Nazi, maybe it’s not the other people you should be worried about.

A good chunk of the left (not the Dems, the actual left) understands the US legal system. It’s just that it’s hard to win in a pay-to-play system when everyone who can pay is against you.

Diplomacy is like an oxygen supply: You only notice it when it fails. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t generally work.

If you think Karl Marx was an idiot (not just wrong, but an idiot), you don’t understand the conversation well enough to participate.

Yes. That makes you a leftist. Center-leftist, but in this political climate…good enough.

Authoritarianism under the banner of socialism isn’t success. It’s just a different kind of failure.

In publicly-traded corporations, long term wealth extraction isn’t the goal. Getting sales up next quarter is. Employee-owned cooperatives are more likely to think long term. Plus, I’d vastly prefer to trust the average worker to do the right thing in a coop situation vs a manager doing it in a situation where they’re legally required (as standard publicly-traded corporations are) to prioritize the financial gains of shareholders above all other interests. Maybe you’ve lost so much faith in people that you think no one would ever choose to be slightly less rich for any reason. But plenty of people know there’s such a thing as enough, that there are interests as important as next quarter’s profits. They just don’t usually get MBAs.

Workers don’t give a shit about customers because that’s how the incentive system is set up. Give workers the profits, you give them a good reason to give a shit about how clients feel.