I was in a similar spot as a manager for years. You can’t fix everything but you can improve the conditions for your workers and in my experience, this also was the key to making our store the top in our entire state. They will not always ingratiate you with the higher-ups, but if metrics improve, they will notice and at the bare minimum tolerate you.

A few good things you can do:

• Write glowing recommendations and beg for raises every year. Also make a point to do mentorship to help each worker build their career and skills in the ways they want. You don’t always have to put all of this in a review, but if it looks good and they make progress, do it.

• Spend that team building budget every month. Tell your team what it is and ask for their feedback on how they want to use it.

• Ask for input from your team and listen to what they have to say. Be transparent about what is going on, what your goals are, and what limitations you have, then try to find a way to find a place of compromise between those limitations and the feedback your team gives. Again, be open about this and ask what they think of any compromises. They’ll often have a better idea of what will work to improve conditions more than you will, particularly if you are open with them about goals and limitations.

• If it’s reasonable and safe for you to do so, encourage them to organize themselves into a union. You probably cannot join this, but you don’t need to tell your bosses they are organizing until they have done it. You can act as a screen to their efforts until they have the power to demand recognition.

Maybe for those who wish to support bombing foreigners while funnelling the military industry into their state.

Motherfucker parades around like he’s antiwar because he voted “nay” on a single ballot initiative that was already a shoo-in and inconsequential for him to vote against. Literally a couple months later, he voted to further the funding for those military actions.

Bernie has had blood on his hands for 30-40 years now and continues to try to wash it off with more blood.

Someone who pretends to support the poor at home while simultaneously supporting bombing and invading the poor elsewhere sure is a role model, just not a good one.

Sometimes it’s much more fun when you just don’t interact and they seeth from the lack of attention. Can’t be you against the world when the world walks away.

a huge fucking war next door, hybrid attacks and a noticeable uptick in espionage.

Thanks, Democrats!

And today we were reminded that it’s actually happening - our most important ally is now led by a maniac.

…our most important ally is now has always been led by maniacs.

We’re trading one ghoul for another. Even if you think it will get worse and don’t think the Dems will deserve credit for what happens alongside the Republicans, never forget that it was the Democrats who made this possible. They could stop these things, but they don’t. They don’t even throw themselves in front of it as a speed bump.

He’s a billionaire, I’m sure he could hire a couple people to help.

Every wall I’ve seen from you has been very informative. Sometimes additional context is needed for a complex topic/point to make sense and as concise as you may try to be, the question deserves a longer answer. Besides walls of text are a meme at this point and we must stick with tradition!

Confirmed, Cowbee is an AI but with good takes!

Fr though, are you really a leftist if you don’t respond with a wall of text occasionally?

I imagine it would be similar to the authoritarian practice of forcing teenagers to attend school: it really depends upon how it is organized and executed with additional variations in response based upon the individual.

What is this, academia?

For real, it doesn’t take much reading to dispell many of the myths and I frankly think most people wouldn’t be content to stop there. Once you begin reading, you hunger for more.

I appreciate the extra effort you made to use profile pics.

This may help clear up much of where you are butting heads with MLs in your comments.

it’s non-Marxists that paint Marxism as dogmatic and inflexible.

Yeah, it’s such a tired trope that it’s almost become a meme.

Never in my life have I seen someone call Star Wars prophetic before this moment.

Don’t turn it into Harry Potter. SW has seen enough pain as it is.

I would only suspect anti-Stalin leftists of ignorance as I have yet to find an instance where someone talks about Stalin in this way and it isn’t from a place of ignorance. Never seen it from someone who was informed and purposely pushing anti-Stalin Cold War propaganda…except fucking Trots.

Not that ignorance is a good excuse for their actions, but the amount of damage propaganda has done to the history surrounding Stalin is very difficult to break through and shouldn’t be overlooked. If someone didn’t grow up in a Western country, it seems they have a serious advantage in overcoming the challenge of looking at Stalin with a critical eye because they aren’t constantly exposed to an overwhelming amount of trash heaped on his grave. Not only can it be difficult to find information that isn’t Red Scare propaganda on your own, but you’ll be ostracized when trying to speak to anyone about the subject from anything but an anti-comminist perspective. It makes having discussions on the subject difficult and I can’t say I would have ever broken through this without the Internet.

Maybe I’m going too easy on them because overall I agree with you. I also want to give people the benefit of the doubt because I was once where they were and my anti-Soviet, anti-Stalin, and anti-China stances all came from a place of ignorance (and miseducation) that I only overcame once I began looking at the topics with a critical eye and put effort into learning about them from a different (and materialist) perspective.

A friend sent me this. Doesn’t work on most phones now, just older androids I think. It’s meant to teach you not to scan unknown QR codes by causing androids to restart on scanning.

At least five generations living outrageously opulent lifestyles while assuming they’re shite with money.

The situation is more complicated than your comparison and your analysis shows a fundamental lack of understanding about what critical support is or why it’s given. It only appears like cherry-picking when you don’t understand the underlying reasoning that informs these decisions and how they are consistent with Marxist-Leninist theory.

A better metaphor for comparison is if you think of Putin as chemotherapy. Chemotherapy is poisonous, it’s bad for your body, and enough of it will kill you. It sucks and it hurts to go through, however, it also kills cancer cells (weakens US/Western hegemony/imperialism). No one likes chemotherapy and everyone recognizes that is bad for your body, but we suggest the use (critically support the use) of chemotherapy in the fight against cancer (Western Imperialism/capitalism) because it helps us progress toward our ultimate goal.

If the West had allowed Putin to join their hegemony as he had always wanted, then there would be no critical support for him from MLs because all the geopolitical waves he makes that are destructive towards the Western imperialist geopolitical waves would not exist. Anytime you see an ML saying “I love you daddy Putin” please understand that it’s a joke. People misrepresent our positions all the time and we cope by embracing them in jest. He’s a capitalist pig who we’d like to see gone or reformed like the others, but he’s a strategically useful pig in that his actions are weakening Western Imperial power in the current moment. By the ML definition, imperialism = capitalism (it’s just the stage we are in) and the biggest base of imperial power comes from the US. Once the bigger threat is defeated, if he’s still around and up to capitalist bullshit, Putin will not have our support. While his actions help support our goals, it makes no sense for us to actively oppose him when we could better spend that energy elsewhere. It’s similar to “the enemy of my enemy is my [strategic] friend”. ML prefers an approach that is more focused on pragmatism than ideological purity.

Not all leftists agree on this type of critical support. Typically, those are the ones shouting for more purity and are typically who we call ultras. The same reasons they would not critically support Putin are the same reasons they don’t support China and call it capitalist (a focus on ideological purity rather than a practical approach toward achieving our goal of communism).

If you want to better understand why certain leftists do what they do, there is plenty of material out there explaining leftist theory and contemporary geopolitical analysis. Likewise, you could always ask us why we take certain positions on Lemmygrad or Hexbear. There is likely someone happy to take the time to explain or a well written explanation that already exists that can be linked for you if you show genuine interest and a willingness to listen, though you should be warned to expect some prickly responses in those spaces due to people who asked before you and turned out to be trolls.

The extent of the energy I’m willing to spend on the topic now ends here. Hopefully it helped clarify what we mean by critical support.

Don’t forget how the Democrats supported free and fair elections by suing third parties all over the country to remove them from ballots and collaborated with Republicans to form private organizations that allowed them to legally bar third parties from participating in debates and gaining valuable time in the media.

Since when did fascists need an election to gain power and whose support gave them that power?

What you really got there is a big old tent of fucking fascists collaborators, which means from a practical standpoint, you’ve got a big tent full of fucking fascists. Those criticisms are the calls warning you that they will do nothing to stop the rise of fascism and, worse yet, are actively aiding its rise by stamping out any competition to their rule that will show strong opposition to fascism. These are warning calls that echo the realities of our history and you should heed them! Germany is not the only example mirroring this path.

If you really want to dig a bit deeper into motivations, the Democrats will and have always supported right wingers over the left because they have more in common with the fascists than actual leftist movements. They are far more threatening than the Republicans simply in that they pretend they aren’t also right-wing and swindle people into acting against their own class interests.

People see the fascist without the mask, but it’s much harder for them to recognize the monster when it instead smiles at them and removes the mask slowly.