Elissa Slotkin IS the oligarchy. She is the Hot Dog Princess. Her grandpa owned BallPark Franks—subsidiary of the Tyson Foods megacorp. Every time someone eats a hot dog, Elissa gets more passive income than most folks earn from a year’s labor.
She sucks, I voted for Harper in the primaries but the Dems are full of neo-libs like her. It’s hard to see that party go more liberal even with Sander’s and AOC’s help
They actively work against Sanders and AOC. Both are the enemy to the average corporate-whore Dem.
I didn’t realize hot dogs got so expensive!
Except at Costco.
RIP the Costco Polish dog.
She also is only in office because she kept district hopping to avoid getting primaried until she was up for a senate seat, whereupon the Democratic Party pushed out or made concessions to all the other better candidates so they would drop. She’s widely reviled.
Calling it now. newsom’s VP pick.
Among the shittiest hot dogs on the market. It’s Nathan’s or Hebrew National, everything else is garbage.
Nathan’s make me extremely sick because they are sweetened with sorbitol.
Huh, thanks for this. I have family that swears by them, but they also make me sick. I didn’t realize they had sorbitol. I had wondered why their brand was so disagreeable to me.
There are places in the USA where you can find smaller, more local hot dog makers.
The best I’ve had are Hippey’s Franks from Denver, Pennsylvania.
Ream’s in Elburn IL. Superb
Better than Hebrew Nat?
ETA subsidiary of ConAgra
So much better than Hebrew National, Ballpark, Nathan’s or any national brand. Bigger, more and better flavor.
Well I just need to road trip a couple thousand miles and get a good dog. It’s been YEARS.
I don’t think it’s just a US east coast thing. See if there are any local butchers near you and check out what they sell. Or, look for local, independent meat companies.
We don’t have indie butchers or meat companies near, anymore, but I’m going out of town in a couple of weeks so I’ll see if where I’m going does. They probably do.
Hebrew national > Aren’t sausages mostly pork?
Hot Dogs can be pork, chicken or beef, or even a combination. Hebrew National is all beef. I prefer all beef wieners myself.
“Not resonating with voters”
Bernie and AOC’s “Fighting Oligarchy” campaign is pulling in more people to their rallies than attended Obama’s in 08.
Don’t peddle that horseshit you Liberal traitor.
No CIA member is ever liberal.
Neoliberal
OK but that’s not what they said, is it?
Here’s who her donors are, if that’s of interest to anybody
https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/elissa-slotkin/summary?cid=N00041357
What does “Retired” mean for top donor?
These are donations from retired individuals
It’s by donor profession. So things like “lawyer”, “student” or in this case “retired”.
No, she can fuck off.
The oligarchy is killing us, and spinning language won’t change that. Meanwhile, ‘woke’ just means ‘social empathy’, which is ironically the solution to many of the problems the oligarchy is causing (and they’re not shy about this – Musk recently said empathy is bad).
We need more ‘woke’, not less. And being butthurt that the fascists are using ‘woke’ as a slur against us is childish and easy to ignore if you’re not too simple to get it.
Fuck this. I’m woke and proud of it. We all should be.
Woke means understanding we live in an oligarchy in my mind. MAGA calls people sheep while complaining about them being woke in the same breath. They don’t even understand the language they use.
They don’t even understand the language they use.
They don’t have ideas. They just use words as pretexts for bullying and oppression. They worship force.
Woke is not weakness!
It’s funny, because the “Wake up, Sheeple!” line used to be what conservatives screamed at liberals for failing to understand their latest Ayn Rand inspired diatribe.
Then liberals adopted the “Wake up!” phrasing to describe structural racism, the enormous socio-economic cost of the Military Industrial Complex, and the inherent class warfare of privatization schemes. That caused “Woke” to fall out of fashion with the right.
Now it’s totally lost any context. “Woke” just means being visually queer coded or insufficiently religious. Its barely more than a slur.
specifically it was used by AA people in the start, now it has been co-opted by the right wingers and perverted, much like they did with “punisher”
Fine. Then come up with a plan to educate conservatives. Because this thing where the state legislates new norms (e.g. bio men in bio women’s sports) is NOT making sense to them. They are freaking out because they don’t understand it. And we can’t just make laws to make them accept it.
From their perspective they are losing their country. We can laugh and call them backwards, but that won’t help. There HAS to be a plan that is better than, f-you wake up.
Fuck conservatives. They don’t need to be educated, they need to be beaten. There are more people left of center than right, we just need to prove we’re actually going to fight for them. All of them. Not 80% and then we’ll start to strategize on how many “urban” voters we can lose to pick up white suburbanite conservatives.
Just to drive this point home for the quiet listeners at the back of the house, I’ve had very long conversations with conservatives (I’m in a red area) who actually get more distrustful the more you relate to them. I’ve been told to my face that nobody cares that much about other people, and I was clearly only pretending to in order to make them listen to me. That it was obvious, because nobody cares that much. That empathy can only be manipulative, and is never real.
It took me years to understand this isn’t a contradiction, but that since they can’t imagine caring that much, I must be fake.
My whole outlook changed once I realised that. It’s insane, but many people literally can’t envision caring, and they think you’re fake and just want recognition for doing so.
Several of these surveys take on a different meaning once you realise there are fundamentally different perspectives like this.
e: and this is one of the biggest divides with conservatives. Simple word choice will not bridge this gap.
They don’t need to be educated, they need to be beaten.
You cannot educate someone who refuses to learn, especially those who reject reason and knowledge. They support fascists because they worship force. They will continue laying waste to everything around them until their murderous shitshow is comprehensively defeated. Throwing sweet reason at them won’t achieve that.
That’s why I get impatient with those who suggest that the way forward is to tinker with the voting system, or to amend the Constitution some more, or to educate the populace. The fascists are at war with us right now. We need to pick our collective ass up off the ground and resist by any means necessary and stop pretending that the system is going to save us, or (like the DNC) that Trump will eventually piss off enough people that the Democrats can win another election, despite all the rigging and voter suppression.
This is an existential situation, the building’s on fire, now’s not the time to be talking about redecorating.
That’s a big problem that switching from ‘oligarch’ to ‘king’ won’t solve. Using different words is a very simplistic answer, when what we’re fighting here is not a language barrier but a wide cultural one.
The real issue is complex and multifaceted: conservatives have been highly propagandised through increasingly insulated media bubbles to the point that now there’s very little that can penetrate them, and switching up a few words will not get them to listen. They’ve been taught to be distrustful of facts and reality, and to believe that compassion is weakness.
I don’t know how to fix this, but watering down our language will not help. That’s been tried many times, and it always backfires.
And from personal experience, even if you find common ground and get them to recognize something is bad, they’ll sit back down in front of Fox News and revert to the norm before any of it matters. I had a “law and order, national security” type conservative acquaintance who right after the Trump classified documents story broke said Trump should go to prison for it (he also had to add that Hillary Clinton should go too). I’m certain he voted for Trump this time around. And he’s had nary a peep about the multiple war plans chats. They aren’t gettable if you just find the right issue or use the right words. If they’re going to change it’s going to happen on their own and over a long time.
There has to be a relentless flow of propaganda to keep them spun up. We need to shut that down.
I’m not sure about this. People with money spent a lot to tell everyone that these things are problems. If we spent the same amount of money to say the opposite, opinions would differ.
…well they are backwards, they’re only about one-third of the electorate, and they will never ever vote fascist-light; meanwhile there’s another unrepresented third of the electorate just waiting for anyone to offer them something worth voting FOR…
Maybe the democrats need to ditch pro-oligarchy anti-woke members 🤷♂️
“ She said Democrats should stop using the term ‘oligarchy,’ a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes ‘kings,'” wrote Wren, who reported that Slotkin was planning to deliver a series of speeches in the coming months about her plan.”
Did you miss this part?
Ah , see, that take is rationalizing. She’s a former CIA torturer who worked under Bush. Within Michigan she once moved into a lobbyists house to avoid getting primaried after redistricting. (The lobbyist’s house was in a safe democrat area that the Democrat party did not field a local candidate for.) Her ascension to state senator was equally questionable - all the other candidates dropped out after meeting with party officials.
It’s clear she’s the Democrats new Joe Manchin, put there to avoid progress and force concessions if they ever win a plurality. All the Michiganders I know vehemently hate her.
Ah , see, that take is rationalizing. She’s a former CIA torturer who worked under Bush.
First she was in the DA not DO at the CIA so she factually was not a torturer as analysts weren’t doing torture rather the spies were. Secondly every single person in the executive branch works for whomever is POTUS so it is not a surprising claim to say she worked under POTUS at the CIA.
Edit: The directorate of analysis is where she worked. If the CIA directly hired torturers that worked for the CIA they would be in the directorate of operations. That being said the CIA contracts out torture through foreign intelligence, criminal groups, military/paramilitaries, or police when they have been found to do so. This is not an endorsement of torture but rather an explanation of how the CIA is divided and which side hires torturers, assassins and criminals.
First she was in the DA not DO at the CIA so she factually was not a torturer as analysts weren’t doing torture rather the spies were.
Your defense of her is that she chose to work for torturers? Why would anyone work for torturers?
Im not defending her Im correcting your error. A simple look at her background would make it clear your claim was wrong.
1- I’m not who made the claim
2- How is this distinction a material difference? If she worked for torturers then she is unsupportable
Im sorry for my error and my hypocrisy.
Right now anyone who is anti-fascist needs to be on the same team. Anyone saying we should reject anyone who is anti-fascist because they do not cling to a specific ideology are a larger part of any problem we are facing than she is.
Its great that you’re into solid research. I admire that. Maybe you could take a moment to read Slotkins wikipedia then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elissa_Slotkin
And google her caucus memberships. They tell you who she is, and its not great. And she’s another “Endorsed by Liz Cheney” Dem which is the coveted endorsement for liberals.
Let me help get you started from that wikipedia page:
Caucus memberships
New Democrat Coalition
Problem Solvers Caucus[
I know who she is. I believe you are incorrect in your take on her and Im not sure you understand how our system works at all which is a frequent problem for leftists.
I know who she is. I believe you are incorrect in your take on her
Great, explain her caucus memberships and being a top AIPAC recipient then. Go ahead, I’ll wait. Do you need me to google the mission of those caucuses for you? Even the stated mission would do it, we dont even need to look at the awful things they actually support or the various ways they have shafted members of the democratic party for decades.
Did you miss mediaite is another corporate propaganda rag to prop up the
oligarchykleptocracy?
Way to advertise what side she’s really on.
Her name is: Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI)
Just so you don’t accidentally vote for her.
Ulg shes the one voting with repubs
Was looking for this. One of the many many many problems the US has is spineless cowards terrified of trying to fix the underlying problem because every single election they ever have is always “the most important election in history”, that if they can just keep the bad guy out this once they can fix the systemic problems in their democracy later. And yet, the Democrats won in 2008, 2012, and 2020, with a congressional majority accompanying four of those years, and y’all did nothing during that time to fix matters.
So many people will say “this is a gross oversimplification, they do lots of progressive things” while ignoring the world around them.
The fact we had to invent a political term for them is enough to tell me that we need to abandon this fascist supporting party.
The oligarchy pays me to pretend to fight for you! Wait. Cut that part.
I can’t do what [AOC] does because we live in a purple state, and I’m a pragmatist
“It’s pragmatic for me to avoid making my Republican donors upset.” What an idiot.
shes in the wrong party
Unfortunately shes in the right party for this BS. This is what the Dems have been for decades. We need a new party, not a new democrat.
We need a Guillotine Party, to do for the Democratic party what the Tea Party did for the GOP: Take it over from the inside out.
what the Tea Party did for the GOP
Astroturf?
Yes, but it worked. It got lots of people who felt very small and very threatened and who were/are envious of successful, educated “libs” to rally around populist candidates who didn’t want to make everyone’s lives better, but instead just make everyone else as miserable as the Tea Party followers.
Exactly. The current GOP looks more like the Tea Party than it does the pre-tea-party GOP. They managed to effect change within the party.
The GOP wasn’t a party designed and built for decades around the concept of crushing progressive members into line. If they had been, they’d have been more equipt to handle it.
Willfully or blindly ignorant, but the result is the same.
Man I figured this was paraphrased because I can’t trust a headline nowadays even if it used quotes but nope. Used those exact terms in that way. Says to retake flag energy. Fuck that nationalist shit. Definately need to redefine patriotism around the constitution and civil rights but sure as shit not around the flag. The flag is a symbol of the ideals that should be respected not a thing itself to respect.
Patriotism is bad don’t redefine it abolish it.
National pride can be a powerful motivator towards doing good. The belief in a nation as a group of people working towards a common goal is fundamental to collectivism.
When patriotism turns into nationalism, that’s where it becomes toxic.
National pride absent something like a colonizing force always has an out group and always abstracts the interests of real people to the interests of the elite of the abstract “nation”.
What if the out group is fascists and kings?
Spoiler alert.
It won’t be.
You don’t need “nationhood” to be anti-fascist and anti-monarchy.
I think patriotism is fine if your espousing a good functioning system. Patriotism for patriotisms sake is the issue to me. Its like every time I see a god bless america sign I want to get a sign that says americans be deserving of gods blessing. Your country is not good because of the name of your country but if your country is good if its actually free and equitable.
First, if patriotic imagery works when it comes to campaigning why shouldn’t they do it? Why not adopt winning tactics?
Second “ She said Democrats should stop using the term ‘oligarchy,’ a phrase she said doesn’t resonate beyond coastal institutions, and just say that the party opposes ‘kings,'” wrote Wren, who reported that Slotkin was planning to deliver a series of speeches in the coming months about her plan.”
that sounds a lot more like suggesting we don’t talk over the heads of the voters than suggesting we shouldn’t confront the problem. Do you take issue with this?
I think after decades of the term “oligarch” being used in popular culture and nationwide news coverage, people in the “forgotten middle” know what oligarchy is. She’s doing the exact thing “liberal elites” get accused of doing all the time which is insulting her constituents’ intelligence.
just say that the party opposes ‘kings,'”
This is incredibly dangerous
It argues that a pseudo King like Trump is the problem. That is a lie. It is the oligarchs who prop up dictators like Trump who are the problem
This is an issue of systems, not of individuals. She’s intentionally trying to individualize a systemic issue. This is because she serves those oligarchs and is protecting them by attempting to scapegoat Trump.
We must reject this
Kings are single actors. Oligarchy is a group which includes corporations. She is part of a pro business caucus and she is one of the worst zionists in the party. Can you stop trying to whitewash her? She is a monster who needs to be removed, not understood.
You think kings are singular actors? Have you ever studied any real life monarchy closely? That’s an inaccurate claim.
Im not trying to whitewash her I am addressing the errors in your comment.
Stop trying to claim moral high ground we are not arguing here. You made an extremely ignorant comment that was completely incorrect and all I am doing is pointing that out. You shouldn’t be this proudly incorrect
its just chasing the ignorance and redefining. They have assigned me to woke that is all about trans and such as opposed to realizing we don’t have a free and fair and functioning system. Maybe they can get other times of voters but talking to dumbed down will alienate my kind.
And this is why fascism is winning.
Yep. When the ‘resistance’ grand plans are to adopt the fascist framing (e.g. that ‘woke is weak’ and should be surrendered) what’s the point in having an opposition party?
what’s the point in having an opposition party?
To co-opt and prevent real opposition.
They’re winning because of exactly what she said. There’s an issue of perception that people on the left will never fully grasp.
You all have no idea to engage online or publicly in a way that comes off as appealing.
