Spin universal healthcare as “Those damn overpayed doctors should be forced to support their nation!” and BOOM, patriotism.

We can do both. It will take time and strong, sustained effort. But we can do it.

Socialism/communism = “someone got something that I don’t think they deserved.”

They’re just bad words to people. I think a lot of the “normal people” on the right are just people who are too stupid to understand politics, so it works like their football team. You don’t need to know anything about the Dallas Cowboys or Patriots to hate them. Democrats are bad because they are the other team. We don’t need to know what “woke” means - it’s just a word that describes people on the bad team.

If you manage to avoid the trigger words, and they haven’t been propagandized on whatever specific topic, it’s really easy to convince them to agree with a lot of left leaning ideas.

We’re taking all the glasses and killing the birds too right?

For anyone else who didn’t get the joke, I already googled it and figured it out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

If anyone is curious, I found it using, “Asian jump ahead” 😅

kinda abstract, how about “Down to the Good Ol’ Countryside”?

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Who said it’s volunteer work? They’d better be paying me

Oh, sweetie, that is precious. You are and have been your entire life.

Here is a complete list of farm subsidies you are paying for. The totals are mind bogglingly huge.

https://farm.ewg.org/

When watching the TV Series The Handmaid Tales I kept thinking that things like their very heavy security appartus, military for the continuing seccession war and heavy use of dedicated manpower doing manual work in house chores (at least for the upper classes) would use too much manpower, taking it away from actual productive activities and thus making a modern nation level of life (in the material sense, not other senses) unsustainable, though Gilead could sorta keep going for a while drawing down on the wealth of the part of the US from were it was formed, before falling down to mid-XX century South American levels of wealth or worse.

However temporary slavery like this “national duty field work” might actually “solve” some of the agricultural production manpower shortage problems in such a society.

So it actually makes sense (in a sick way) that it’s appealing to the most extreme Fascist amongst the Republicans.

Where does it say you don’t get paid?

Also, in terms of understanding how things happen, this is definitely not a bad thing.

So many people take everything for granted. I worked a couple of years in agriculture. Long days, tough work. I will never look down on a farmer, and it thought me some neat lessons in life too.

Is it better to force poor people to work in farms to survive? In a world where a large number of ‘modern’ westernized countries have active military conscription for young people, I don’t see this as being worse than that, either. The thing with slavery, is that it is lifetime, unpaid, terrible conditions, based on a feeling of superiority, only for the targeted groups, etc.

Of course, the better solution is just to treat farm workers fairly and pay them well, and work on automation at the same time. But rich people were forced to work in farms too, the conditions would probably get a whole lot nicer for everyone involved, and it would probably create a pretty big incentive to start automation as well.

edit: to actually be fine, it would have to be run by the govt. on nationally owned farms, like schools are, for workers to be paid and well treated, and for rich people to not be exempt

Wow, never heard of this, thank you

Great source, thanks for sharing!

Some choice excerpts:

Problems arose immediately for the A-TEAM nationwide. In California’s Salinas Valley, 200 teenagers from New Mexico, Kansas and Wyoming quit after just two weeks on the job. “We worked three days and all of us are broke,” the Associated Press quoted one teen as saying. Students elsewhere staged strikes. At the end, the A-TEAM was considered a giant failure and was never tried again.

“These [high school students] had the words and whiteness to say what they were feeling and could act out in a way that Mexican-Americans who had been living this way for decades simply didn’t have the power or space for the American public to listen to them,” [Stony Brook University history professor Lori A. Flores] says. “The students dropped out because the conditions were so atrocious, and the growers weren’t able to mask that up.”

She says the A-TEAM “reveals a very important reality: It’s not about work ethic [for undocumented workers]. It’s about [the fact] that this labor is not meant to be done under such bad conditions and bad wages.”

And what one dude who went through the program as a 17 year old has to say about it now:

But he says the experience also taught them empathy toward immigrant workers that Carter says the rest of the country should learn, especially during these times.

“There’s nothing you can say to us that [migrant laborers] are rapists or they’re lazy,” he says. "We know the work they do. And they do it all their lives, not just one summer for a couple of months. And they raise their families on it. Anyone ever talks bad on them, I always think, ‘Keep talking, buddy, because I know what the real deal is.’ "

My reading is that it failed because there was no political will to actually provide for local-born farmers any more than immigrants. And as such, it was doomed to fail from the start.

Caesar Chavez was a goddamn American hero until he sold out.

They want to live like how they imagined their grandfathers lived.

But its mostly media lies and misremembered nostalgia

People in University or with University Education will “of course” be exempted from this duty which, by an amazing coincidence will exempt the scions of the rich and upper middle class.

It’s a similar technique as what’s used in not just the US but also countries like the UK to make sure the children of “upper” classes don’t have to endure certain hardships and have enhanced future opportunities even in accessing Upper Education: it’s not at all *cough* *cough* because they’re the children of wealthy parents, it’s purelly because they frequent (expensive) private schools and the children of the poor and working class too when they frequent such schools have access to those things (the “small” detail that the poor and working class cannot actually afford it, remains unsaid).

Whenever a Neoliberal talks about how meritocratic their system is, remember that they defend privatised education, something which as I explained above just means a two tier system were those who can afford it purchase for their children easy access past certain gatekeepers of future opportunities such as access to certain Universities whilst the rest are in a different track - the state school system - with far lower chances, all of which is the very opposite of a merit-based system.

I can almost hear the bone spurs growing…

Poor “volunteers” will do the backbreaking manual labor. Rich volunteers will drive the heavy machinery in air conditioned cabins.

Cases of bone spurs are skyrocketing

My father was a farmer in the 90s and wrote to Bill Clinton to ask for more regulation and study of the effects of pesticides and more protections for farmers in relation to pesticides and Bills response back was basically “No”. It did come on a really nice piece of paper though and had the “from the desk of the president” letter head and everything.

And just for the record, Monsanto is now part of Bayer.

That’s the beauty of it.

Conservatives will push for laws that affect urban public schools and have their kids in private schools or live outside city limits.

I’d be super on board for this. Treat it similarly to the military, where room and board are provided, and they ship you to an underserved part of the country to help.

Especially if we extended the GI Bill to cover participating. Like, do 4 yrs and you get full tuition covered at any public university.

I think it would really promote national unity and help to lift people out of poverty. You’d have people from all over the country working together, bridging a lot of our internal divisions. You’d get people out of their bubbles and echo chambers and have them actually seeing the country.

If we could normalize it, where it’s just what people did after highschool, it would give people time to figure their lives out. Remove the pressure of having to choose a career right away. I know so many people who “had to go to college” because that was the next step, but didn’t have a clue what they wanted in life, so got useless majors and have dead ended. This would be perfect for people like that.

Plus infrastructure in the US is a joke. And even as the OP implies, farming is a broken business in the US for a number of reasons. There are never enough people working soup kitchens and food pantries, or cleaning up our national forests to prevent forest fires. If we could mobilize our young people en masse, we could make a huge difference in this country.

I’m 1000% on board.

Without a draft it’s just a Keynsian jobs program like CCC or Teach for America. Not the worst idea in the world.

I heard in Finland it’s kinda like this. You have to do something like a year in the military or a year in civil service and I like it. Don’t want to do the military? Fine, do the postal service or some shit just do something. It’s like a great equalizer since rich and poor have to do it and they all have the same options.

I already think some kind of required (paid) community service year should be required for every citizen, so I guess part of that could be agriculture.

There’s great arguments here about how a service corps could bridge divides and give all youth a better pathway from highschool into the (often predatory) worlds of job markets and higher ed, and also great arguments about why mandatory service infringes on freedom pretty significantly.

Is there a way to structure a national year of service idea that gives people the freedom to opt out yet would still get chosen by many kids from diverse backgrounds? Like how do we get kids who have had a college fund ready to go since they were born to see the benefits of spending a year building bridges? It would be a neat cultural shift.

they’ll take you to the town square and the agricorps will bid on you

You can eat all the apples you like just make sure you pick 4000 per day.

No, the farmers design bridges and dams.

The engineers work in hospitals.

The doctors we shoot for being nerds.

Perfect society.

Edit: we also kill all the sparrows for some reason.

I so want to make a farmer, who likes to complain that comfy office jobs aren’t real work, work a phone support hotline for a year.

The next post explains that agriculture is so important, it should be controlled by the government, with quotas, and rations…

/s

Because then we can seize the means of production.