dougfir

a combination of catholic social teaching and a close family member dying as a result of capitalism and the us government when i was a child primed me for being on the left despite the fact that i also come from a pretty privileged and republican background, but i didn't really get there until bernie 2016, when i was around 18-19. the catholic thing might sound odd but i remember being taught at sunday school as a young kid that we have to love every single person on earth because that was what jesus meant when he said that we have to love our neighbors like we love ourselves. up until bernie i was basically an enlightened centrist really because i wasn't able to see outside the dem-rep binary and i just thought "both of these parties suck so obviously the truth is in the middle of the two of them " . bernie's run taught me that socialism wasn't just "janitors get paid the exact same as brain surgeons" which is pretty much verbatim what i was taught in middle and high school. i started reading some leftist theory and it didn't take long after watching bernie getting ratfucked for me to get more radical

20 min into the latest chapo and two great mispronunciations from felix: "finnit" for finite and "lat-ent" like latin for latent

yeah, this is kind of my thought. this is a group that has probably in the ballpark of 200 active members spread across the whole state. the people in it are at the very least friendly to the idea of socialism - they apparently have some overlap with the PSL or Peace and Freedom Party already, and those people are starting a group in their org that is based on CA independence. From what I heard from party leadership, they are basically berniecrats or to his left who feel deeply upset about how the national dems are handling trump and are aware of the fact that decades of dem rule at the state level hasn't really gotten us any of their goals (universal healthcare, etc) and hasn't protected us from trump.

but yeah they do seem undereducated, for example their manifesto/party charter repeatedly calls california a "nation state" which is an understandable mistake given how those words are used in the US and that even gavin has used such terms to refer to CA but it does show that they haven't really read much political theory at all, much less leftist theory.

they are focusing on organizing at the local level now and i would bet that even a half dozen or fewer comrades could make a local chapter, even for one of CA's big cities, much redder and more politically aware than the statewide org.

i guess the main holdup that i have with it is that i think independence should be for the whole west or west coast and we shouldn't focus just on california. i'd bet that there are a lot of comrades in the PNW that would be receptive to a left-wing independence movement but for obvious reasons someone in seattle or portland might not want to join an org that is just centered on CA.

jesus christ, i was not expecting family annihilation when you said that he killed himself