Definitely! If you want nutritional food, focus on the stuff that’s really cheap and easy to grow and makes the best use of land anyway, whether you’re doing it or consuming it after other people have done so: fresh veggies. Greens, squashes, tomatoes, various tubers, etc. (varies depending on your region, of course).

I was just talking about the focus on protein. It is absolutely not the thing to worry about if you’re interested in “nutritious”. You’re being completely counter-productive if you do that. It leads opposite to the goal you just described.

Just grow and eat veggies and grains. If you’re worried about protein, you’re worried about the wrong thing (you should instead be worried about getting vitamins, minerals, and a generally varied diet). Everything that made people worried about protein on vegetarian or vegan diets is based on a study purposefully misinterpreted by the meat-and-dairy industry, where that misinterpretation was parroted for decades and disowned by the original author of the study. Just because you can fulfill the same protein profile as meat using plant proteins doesn’t mean you need to. The human body evolved to allow us to eat meat opportunistically, not to require it.

Unless you’re on an all-fruit diet, you’re getting enough protein if you’re getting enough calories (literally no matter your exercise regimen). And if you’re not getting enough calories, you’re starving and protein is one of the last of your concerns anyway.

Poor people can’t afford to lend money when they’re struggling just to eat and make rent. It’s not a viable way for them to “keep up” with inflation.

But in a sense you’re right: inflation (by itself) isn’t the problem. The problem is that wages don’t keep up with it. Because the labor movement has been failing not only to make gains, but to prevent failures (e.g. keep our effective wages from going down). Most forms of capitalist passive income keep up with inflation by design, which is no accident.

Generally you should do what:

1. Maximizes your personal well-being (though note I’m not saying “wealth”, because they two are not always the same), and
2. Satisfies your personal and ideological principles as well as possible, at least to the point where you can live with yourself.

Just because we have systemic critiques doesn’t mean we should go live in a cave and eat bugs. To the degree possible we should prefigure the society we want to build, but torturing ourselves individually to do it is both unproductive and likely takes away from our focus on more important things like organizing and taking direct action that impacts the system. We do tend to make personal sacrifices to further our ideological goals, but there’s both a practical limit and one where we shouldn’t be cruel to each other in our expectations.

Many of us are vegans. Most of us probably avoid buying shares in oil companies. But all of our circumstances are different. Perhaps people salting Chevron to radicalize union organizing there will wind up with its stocks in their retirement accounts that are difficult to divest from without harming their ability to retire, due to their particular circumstances. It seems pretty shitty to expect someone to just get rid of them without us having some kind of dependable (e.g. mutual aid) infrastructure in place to take care of each other in our old age.

TL;Dr: Yet you participate in society. Curious!

No. I agree that liberal “democracy” is a sham. But the so-called “ratchet effect” is a useless meme. Democrats push us into reactionary politics too; they don’t just “keep us from going left”. The current head of the Democratic Party, occupying the most powerful political position in the world—more powerful than any king throughout the history of human kind—is the one of the most devout supporters of zionist genocide you’ll find, chose to crush the rialroad strike, largely architected our system of mass incarceration and mass surveillance (he boasts of having authored the Patriot Act, and he actually pushed Ronald Reagan to go harder on the “Drug War” than the latter was inclined to do on his own), led the charge on indebting generations of college students, and is now on the brink of starting WW3 in the Middle East (after risking it in Ukraine).

Genocide is a non-starter, period. It is not, and can never seriously be construed as, harm reduction. Don’t vote for fascists. Those actively enabling genocide against Palestine are fascists. Thankfully, there’s no debating the genocide now if you have any honesty whatsoever. Liberals advocating for voting for genocidal candidates of either/any party can fuck right off and [redacted].

I mean, we’ll never do it under capitalism, Gore. So you good with dismantling capitalism?

(Crickets, I’m sure.)

Removed by mod

Nah, dude. There’s plenty to disagree with in the parts of this message and your other reply down below where you try to imply modern nuclear weapons are clean and pose little to no risk beyond that of conventional weapons. Gaslight all you like, but your words are right there for all to see (unless suddenly they gain an edit timestamp after that of this comment, of course…).

This is a terrible take by someone who has heard plenty of propaganda by the arms industry but knows absolutely nothing about physics. Many of the products of the primary and even secondary nuclear reactions from a nuclear warhead are themselves radioactive and have long enough half-lives to do tons of damage in both the short and long terms. Whether or not there is radioactive material spread around is not simply a question of whether some of the original fuel remains unspent.

If all you’re doing is spreading war propaganda, log off and go rethink your life.

EDIT: Folks, start here and read other materials by the Union of Concerned Scientists. Don’t let this bullshit whitewashing of the dangers of nuclear weapons, their use, and their testing go unaddressed. And speak up against this kind of propaganda showing up in our communities—especially leftist ones.

Nice. I gotta wonder why a flying schoolbus which lands in meadows needs a pop-out “kids loading/unloading; do not pass” stop sign on the side, though. LOL. 😉

Only thing I’m going to (have to, unfortunately) buy today is a round in a couple dryers at the laundromat, because I’ve put it off too long already and the clothes line is currently a no-go due to weather. sigh

Freedom of speech and assembly clearly in action, here. Wow. Imagine a court figuring it could tell a union not to decide its stance on something. Fascist state.

They killed over 1000 innocent people in their latest attack, raped a bunch of people, and kidnapped people, including foreign nationals.

Turns out probably not. You should really stop believing Israeli propaganda at face value. A thousand or so people were killed, yes. Many of who were Israeli militants, and many more definitely settlers and not “innocents”. Some were definitely killed by Palestinian militants (some of whom were Hamas members) during the prison break. But many were killed by IDF and Israeli police, who didn’t care who got caught in the crossfire and literally shot Israeli homes with Israelis sheltering inside using tanks. And also literally did air raids on their own military facilities, where IDF soldiers were defending themselves until being killed by their own friendly (missile) fire. And reports of rape during that particular incident have, so far at least, been debunked.

This might, at least, be a bare start to actually educating yourself (though its clear from the sense of your participation here that that is not a priority for you): A growing number of reports indicate Israeli forces responsible for Israeli civilian and military deaths following October 7 attack

Anyway, Hamas good/bad is a distraction from basically everything. It’s irrelevant when there’s millions of people who have no choice but to engage in violent struggle against their oppressors or be (with more or less speed) genocided.

Their stated goal is the complete destruction of Israel and the Jews

Destruction of the apartheid state of Israel, yes. Not of Jews. You should pay more attention. And destruction of states is good. Destruction of colonialist states is even better. And destruction of apartheid states is an absolute necessity. That doesn’t make other aspects of Hamas good, necessarily, but the destruction of Israel is most definitely not a point against them. Israel must, indeed, be destroyed.

Someone get this Zionist fucker out of here, eh?

Unending storms of propaganda do a lot to influence how ignorant people react in a situation. And it serves to keep them ignorant as well.

(Not the person you were responding to, but that’s my take on how people often react regarding Palestine.)

I’d say that’s a meaningless distinction, and that actions speak louder than words. But as you will.

Yeah, pretty much. The president has enormous power, and that power is even greater outside the country’s borders. Especially because of things like the “Authorization to Use Military Force” which gives him pretty much carte blanche to “fight terrorism” anytime and anywhere he likes.

There’s also this general process by which the president historically just does what he wants, and the rest of the government shrugs its shoulders and rolls over, and thus his office essentially just has that de facto power, no matter what the constitution or other laws say: Renegade Cut: No More Presidents.

The U.S. president is more powerful than any empire in the world has ever been, is pretty much a king, and basically does what he wants. Liberals often make excuses about how his hands are tied. It would be great if that were the case, but it’s really, really not.

I was going to make a funny or meaningful comment, but fuck: look at this shithole full of liberals. Place is getting worse than Beehaw, TBH. Might as well be back on Reddit.

Where the heck is the notion that the U.S. government’s hands are tied coming from?

At least part of the claim is that the president himself has little power. It’s the stupid finger-pointing game. “Biden needs Congress’ permission to do anything at all, ever.” 🙄

A useful excuse when the president doesn’t want to do anything. Falls flat on its face when he actually wants to bomb, shoot, or cage the shit out of any brown people, foreign or domestic.

He could use that fucking awful AUMF bullshit to send in the U.S. military to attack the IDF, for that matter. “No power” is fucking nonsense.

Yeah, I know that is never going to happen, nor would I particularly want it to. But when you have the power to go that far, you have a fuck ton of options in between that and doing absolutely nothing (or worse than nothing, which is what Biden is doing now: providing them cover by pretending the empire doesn’t 100% have the fascists’ backs).

Yeah. Totally fair.