dyi ftw

36, software engineer, woodworker, farmer. Panromantic, demipansexual, and agender. They/them. Happily married to legallynonbinary.I mostly post woodworking and crafting. Part of Lococofarmstead.

[left-reminders]

(are yall taking memes?)

[saywhat-politics]

[scretladyspider]

This is literally happening and I want to set things on fire every time I use Twitter lately

[yahoonews]

[mysharona1987]

[bellfry]

Rich people are always telling the rest of us that if we are short of money, we should stop eating out or going out to movies or clubs or concerts. And now that we have, the economy is collapsing and they want us to eat out and spend on diversions again as soon as possible.

[liberalsarecool]

Be the revolution.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[lotrscenery]

Beorn’s house - Poland

[whitepeopletwitter]

[socialistexan]

Senators:

Dianne Feinstein (D-CA)

David Purdue (R-GA)

Kelly Louffler (R-GA)

James Inhoff (R-OK)

Richard Burr (R-NC)

House Representatives:

Susan Davis (D-CA)

Scott Peters (D-CA)

Rob Wittman (R-VA)

Also some aides to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

And this is just the ones we have public reporting on, that’s not to say there isn’t more of them that did this.

[juliaknz]

Javier Senosiain / Organic House Naucalpan de Juárez, Mexico, 1984; all images © Cortesía de Javier Senosiain.

[left-reminders]

Down the drain: Wisconsin dairy farmers told to dump milk because of an oversupply in the market

A West Bend farm says it was told to start dumping tens of thousands of gallons of milk per day because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

'It's discouraging for dairy farmers:' Coronavirus' economic impact on Wisconsin

With the first case of coronavirus confirmed in Wisconsin, the impacts could extend further than just health.

This is capitalism's vast irrationality and inhumanity in action. Markets and The Economy™ matter more to capitalism than the concrete distribution of resources according to tangible human need.

Resources exist in abundance -- give them to people. Housing sits empty -- give it to people. The rules of the feast table should apply to our economic system -- no one gets seconds until everyone has gotten a plate.

We stand at a crossroads in these chaotic times: socialism or barbarism! The ruling class repeatedly chooses the latter. We need to organize and choose the former!

[left-reminders]

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

[left-reminders]

People have been reblogging this with some points that seem fair to call attention to -- milk expires quickly, farmers are locked into a situation where they have to throw stuff out, etc. But the larger point we were trying to illustrate in the original post was that this system compels people to do irrational things in the name of market laws. We have a surplus of goods around us and yet we arbitrarily build up social constructs (property laws and exchangability) to prevent people from comfortably living off of these goods. Goods are produced and given away only if profit can be extracted from the process. These aren't immutable laws of nature, though, and most of human history hasn't operated this way. Not to suggest that things were just peachy keen in slave empires or feudalism -- class stratification in general is a big part of this, not just the particular market laws of capitalism. But it's still important to realize that these irrational all-pervasive market forces are a comparatively recent invention and that these historical moments of crisis demonstrate how truly anti-human production-for-profit and class inequality truly are. We believe that the economy should be more broadly democratized and managed on a for-need/for-use basis by the people actually impacted by the outcomes; that would entail workplace/community democracy, as well as a new emphasis on direct distribution of goods (rather than having those goods wait around to be bought).

Goods sit unused -- give them to people. Make sure everyone has the means to live a comfortable life. These seemingly obvious goals are perpetually blocked by billionaires and profit-sharks, who'd rather see people sleeping on the streets in the middle of a pandemic than have their bottom lines suffer any hit. Things are fundamentally top-down; we believe it is a reasonable proposal to start moving things into a bottom-up direction. That requires choosing socialism at this crossroads of human history.

[left-reminders]

Another reminder: capitalism artificially imposes scarcity.

[its-all-down-hill]

[la-laborista-republiko]

https://iww.org/

[goodwoodwould]

Good wood - sitting on a secluded patch of land in Scotland, just a few metres from the shore of the Sound of Mull, the AirShip is a submarine inspired cabin with a wood-lined interior that keeps up the nautical theme. Quirky but cool AF 🛶🛶🛶

[riddick09]

Love the glass front

[demonius-darkblade]

mooching off the government is a good thing actually. what the fuck else are they gonna do with the money? buy more bombs?

[politijohn]

Shoutout to all the grocery store workers and cleaning staff who are long overdue for $15/hr

[theweirdwideweb]

[redstarovermoundcity]

unions are good. most unions that exist in the US nowadays aren’t, and in fact are actively reactionary. sorry to burst y’alls’ bubbles

[redstarovermoundcity]

real left-wing movements in the US need to confront the fact that our presently-existing labor organization paradigm is arcane, antiquated, and hopelessly unequipped to deal with an economy that isn’t about factories and the industrial production of commodities

[the-transfeminine-mystique]

Something that is so so often implicitly utilized by the Right is the fact that people who are against them will instinctively view whatever the Right is currently attacking as Good, as the thing that must be defended. And so on the one hand that just folds many people back into the system (”the Republicans hate the Democrats so that must mean the Democrats are good”) but on the other it obscures the centuries-long war of attrition that the Right has had against institutions like unions in the US, where the radical elements of the most established unions have long since been stamped out and national union leadership has for decades been more about having a personal political fiefdom than about standing in solidarity with union members, and collapses it all into “well the Right hates these unions, so therefore they’re Good and Radical and must be defended and have their praises sung”