rotates him

When Hollywood execs say that they'll wait until their writers/actors are losing their homes and starving to get them to come back to work, (bluffing or not,) they're laying bare the reason capitalists are so vehemently opposed to strong social policies;

If people don't have to work in order to ensure a roof over their heads, clothes on their backs, good health, and food on their tables then corporations have zero means of coercing people to work in the unsafe, degrading, and/or meaningless jobs that facilitate profit for the owners and stockholders at the expense of everyone at the bottom of the organizational structure.

Strike funds are how unions help their members stay afloat for the duration of a strike. As long as they're not working, they ain't getting paid, and creditors and landlords don't take “I'm on strike” as an excuse. Unions also sometimes partner with a local food bank to provide food assistance to further soften the financial blow.

On a practical level, all of these measures also help reduce the incidence of scabbing. Mortgages/rent, credit card bills, ongoing health care, etc. all make very compelling arguments for crossing the picket line. The more members continue to have their basic needs met, the more of them will stand strong.

If you have some disposable income, and there's a union local near you that's on strike, ask them if they're accepting donations from non-members to their strike funds. Ask them if they have a public donation link (PayPal, GoFundMe, whatever) that you can share with friends/post on the internet.

I'll bring this up at my UPS Store and if our drivers go on strike August 1st then we should all chip in to give them some cash to tide them over and show our support.

endlessly fascinated by the fact that i've arrived at many of my far left political opinions, many of which conservatives would characterize as naive, "bleeding-heart", or "touchy-feely" through cold analytical ruthlessness. oh, you find it personally distasteful to let "bad people" walk free? suck it up buttercup, i'm here to reduce crime and keep our streets safe.

conversely many conservative views, especially regarding "law-and-order," while sometimes characterized as pragmatic, when prodded essentially devolve into saying "i consider high crime rates a fair price to pay for indulging my most base urges." bloodthirsty fools

though to be clear, what one means when they say "results," what sort of outcomes someone considers desireable in the first place, is naturally going to be driven by some set of core values. and i do consider compassion and mercy core values. i'm not, like, an enlightened sociopath. i just think a truly enlightened sociopath would agree with me about many things

I feel this so hard. Like it's not just that I think every person deserves housing, but also if you don't like people sleeping on benches, the most effective solution is to give everyone guaranteed permanent housing. I also think everyone deserves housing fundamentally anyway, but if I turned off my empathy entirely I still reach the same policy conclusions.

I have increasingly been using these sorts of frames in my political writing and I find it both potentially very powerful (if also potentially sharp) and also woefully underutilized. There is fertile ground here and I encourage progressive political actors to till it.

By “sharp” I mean that in some cases it may be easy to accidentally reinforce a bad frame (like, in shel's example, the bad frame to avoid would be “get these people out of my sight”, whereas the good frame would be “nobody should be in this situation”). You've got to look out for those. On the plus side, being aware of those hazards tends to help strengthen the final version of the argument.

Anyway, this is why I say “good information makes good policy”, though too often the good information is sealed away in 300-page PDFs no-one reads. There is a lot of power to be gained from knowing the world as it is, distilling that into a compelling, concise argument for what's wrong and how to fix it, and then making that case. I find that these arguments tend to fit the pattern described above: the solution to the problem ends up being the thing that's also morally correct.

You also find out real fast who (still using the same example) wants fewer people sleeping on the streets and who is ideologically opposed to doing anything for unhoused people regardless of how loud the cognitive dissonance gets.

It's true that people can and should be doing a lot more, and if you want to step up and do something, there's lots of ways to help. Please be careful, though.