A bunch of individual lawsuits or even a class action lawsuit is woefully inadequate for the task of holding ICE agents accountable for their crimes. It’s going to take revolutionary tribunals administered by councils of civilians. Even a “reformed” state will let them get away with it if we don’t take matters into our own hands.

This is why class politics is incomplete without an understanding of hierarchy. People within a hierarchy will try to pass accountability up the chain, and it stops at the first person capable of deflecting it down. The more egregious the offense the higher up the chain it goes so the ones at the upper levels make sure the hierarchy is as tall as possible so that accountability never reaches the top. Your manager is the next rung up the hierarchy from you and most offenses are minor enough for them to deflect it. Sometimes the bureaucracy enables the accountability to be spread across so many hands that it fizzles out, and sometimes someone has to take the fall.

TBF Howard Zinn has a rather pessimistic view of class struggle in the US and that is reflected in his book, at least in my opinion. In emphasizing that radical movements have always been crushed, deflected, or co-opted by the political elites he implies the inevitability of such outcomes and often misses some of the ways that those movements still succeeded in radically altering the class arrangement, and the experiences of those who lived quietly in the crossfire of these historical struggles are erased through omission. A lot of that is an understandable limitation of an attempt at an all-encompassing historical account though.

All gender affirming care that is or has been provided to minors at scale is reversible. The standard for providing gender affirming care to minors is puberty blockers and social transition, never anything permanent like surgery. Personally, I don’t see any cause for concern about potential harm to minors from providing gender affirming care, but I do see the harm that is done to them when that care is denied and find it far more concerning given that a common result of that harm is the most permanent and irreversible outcome possible, suicide.

There will never be a perfect person to lead a progressive movement, there are only those imperfect people who take up the mantle. If ever you’re dissatisfied with your choices you should consider taking up the mantle yourself.

Bruh

You did not warn me that he was also cosplaying a sexy leather-bound version of Aang from Avatar The Last Airbender and I was not prepared.

First off, sociopathy isn’t a thing. It’s a made up term a fake psychologist made up to put people on death row in Texas for personal gain. Go listen to the Behind the Bastards episode on it. The actual diagnosis is “psychopathy”

I was only mirroring the language used by the person I was replying to. Great podcast though, I’m already a regular listener.

Look at all of the growing injustice and inequality in the world, spurred on by CEOs, dictators, and billionaires. Just look at health insurance, where hundreds of thousands die each year from denial of care. Look at Elon Musk and DOGE defunding USAID, which resulted in over 100,000 children dying across the world. Look at the destruction and death that Russia has brought to Ukraine to try and conquer them.

Look at everyone in this thread who looks at all of that pain and misery and would want to do something about it. You’re calling them immature? No, you’re the one who’s immature, with all of your bullshit pearl-clutching.

I agree that something must be done, and I understand where the desire to kill those responsible comes from. I feel the same frustration myself, but I also know that engaging in adventurism won’t solve jack shit. At best it can bring temporary relief, and at worst it can trigger an escalation of the violence/repression it was intended to address. The individuals who are most visibly responsible for the injustice in the world today are merely appendages of a much larger group of powerful institutions which are themselves motivated by incentives that are systemic. What I am doing here is not pearl-clutching; my objection is a strategic one, not a moral one. I won’t shed any tears for dead health insurance CEOs, oligarchs, or dictators, but I will always advocate for organizing with others to address the systemic drivers of injustice rather than acting alone and throwing your life away in an act of impotent violence. It’s better to live for a cause than to die for one.

Problem is he completely lacked a systemic critique of society and fixated on crime, which he took for granted as the cause of all problems. For Light, all evil in the world comes down to individual moral failings, and by getting rid of the criminals he was eradicating evil.

I mean, dictators have historically often met with a rather grisly end (Mussolini shot and hung upside down by his toes, Hitler blowing his own brains out, Gaddafi sodomized with a bayonet) and that doesn’t seem to stop people from pursuing the same power.

That is not how it works at all, and it’s actually a very childish way of thinking. There is not some finite pool of monsters these positions of power draw from, the positions of power make the monsters. “Power corrupts” is the most common trope in fiction since the advent of fiction for a reason and it’s baffling that so many people still don’t get it.

The entire theme of Death Note is that power turns people into sociopaths and that no matter how many “bad people” you kill you will never actually succeed in cleansing the world of evil, but I guess no matter how ham-fisted you make it people will still miss the point. It’s funny that a lot of people complain that Light has an unrealistically naive view of morality and yet this comment section seems to be teeming with people who are equally immature.

Killing a leader doesn’t get rid of the position of power that enabled their misdeeds.

When they clean themselves after you touch them they’re actually spreading your smell around, not trying to wash it off. If you watch closely you’ll see them alternate between licking the place you touched and licking various other places around their body.

Loosen control over women by controlling what women are allowed to wear because the clothing she wants to wear comes from a culture that controls what women are allowed to wear. Great job liberating women from having to make their own choices, you’re such a hero.

Right-wingers are unable to distinguish between the content and the frame, so they assume that however conservative media packaged a leftist argument for them is just how it came from the source.

All these Silicon Valley tech bros have been reinventing religion over and over again for years while believing themselves secular rationalists.

Good luck to the spiders trying to learn the routine I don’t have.

I think most who would leave have already left.

In case you’re genuinely curious and not trolling, I’ll explain. Parties in the US are not fixed around a particular ideology or set of stances, but have changed frequently throughout history and often take completely opposite positions from their past iterations. Many historians like to divide US political history into eras called party systems to indicate when parties are roughly cohesive and when they go through major changes, and during the civil war era we were in the Third Party System. During the third party system the Democratic party’s base was made up primarily of white southerners (though there were northern supporters as well) and after the civil war they fought against Reconstruction in order to uphold white supremacy (the only issue that united Democratic voters in the north and south at the time).

Though there isn’t consensus among historians yet, many consider us to be in the Seventh Party System now, so as you can imagine a lot has changed since then. I’ll let you do your own reading on that topic.