There’s another factor here. People who are vegan, sober, poly, don’t drive, and any number of choices are breaking societal norms. Most people don’t even think about these things as choices. They do the default. Realizing that there’s a choice, and that this person decided not to do the default, puts people off. It makes them uncomfortable. They begin to question things they’ve never had to evaluate.
That’s why I stopped using Google a few years ago. I moved to ddg and liked it pretty well. I switched to kagi earlier this year and it’s going pretty well. I still run into some captchas that refuse to let me pass. I usually just turn around at that point
I think a lot of neolibs conflate the two because both groups are more likely to think the system is broken in a significant way. They’re also more likely to do the worst thing imaginable, advocate for things in a tone neolibs don’t approve of. Obviously leftists want good things to happen and conservatives want to hurt people so the conflation is just smug BS
The original definition is a community where private property is not a thing. Private property is when an individual can control the land, tools, and knowledge people need to survive. Private property is factories, not your toothbrush.
Most pro USSR, PRC, or Cuba leftists believe those countries governments controlling all or the vast majority of private property constitutes communism. Some think these countries are socialist and working their way to communism.
Many anti-communist people don’t really understand how these countries work specifically. All their ideas of what communism is are based on how they view the above communist countries.
Finally right wingers will describe California as communist because they have social programs and higher taxes than some states. Basically if the government is intervening in the market by supplying a service or good directly to a citizen that’s communism.
From what I’ve observed most people lie somewhere on this spectrum of definition.
One of the easiest ways to resolve this problem is artificially increasing supply. The government can subsidize the production of food, housing, medical care, and education. It doesn’t matter if people have more money if the supply of a good is always high. Having the government be a provider of these goods in monopolistic or inelastic markets would also be a good idea.
I don’t think UBI should be implemented tomorrow. Subsidizing things today would be a much better first step. Several years of increasing supply and then starting UBI is a better bet.
I dream of a world where I believe problems will be resolved to the benefit of everyone and I don’t have to worry about my family’s financial wellbeing
Can confirm, I just tried to install Google pay and it said I couldn’t use it because I was running a custom ROM.
I use a Fairphone 4 running Murena’s e/os. The experience has been pretty good so far. I haven’t needed to repair the phone yet but it’s nice to know I have the option. The os doesn’t have any quirks I can’t live with. I like their app store, it gives every app a privacy score based on what logging it has and permissions it uses.
Sure, subsidize producers and give people a UBI. Problem solved.
Cheap frozen pizza and a simple salad.
My SO was traumatized by her religious upbringing. The effects of purity culture have left significant scars that make it practally impossible to be physically intimate. Short kisses, holding hands, and hugging are okay but any amount of nudity is over the line. She wants to be intimate and has been working with a therapist to get there but obvious markers of success aren’t there yet. I knew all of this going in to our relationship or learn e them pretty early.
Intentionally helping someone to heal from trauma in a relationship is an appealing concept to me. Being in a romantic relationship with someone I can’t be physically intimate with has some unique problems beyond the problems I had as a single person but on balance out relationship is really good. We’re forced to have really good communication fundamentals so we don’t hurt each other with our conflicting needs. That helps us with tons of aspects of our relationship.
By far this is the most comfortable, enriching, and benefitial romantic relationships I’ve been in.
Effective to the degree they have a material impact on the economy and psychological impact on the powerful and their lackeys. I would argue many of the BLM protests had an effect, if minor, because many cops quit and many cities still have fewer cops than they did before due to difficulty hiring.
Blocking commerce, looting, and arson of empty buildings have significant economic and psychological impacts. From an American perspective, successful social movements like, the suffragettes, civil rights movement, anti-slavery activists, and workers rights groups all engaged in such strategies. It wasn’t until well after that these movements were sanitized to be “non-violent”.
I really like Abus nufix to lock wheels and seatpost. Seatpost is less necessary. Compared to other locking bolts, the housing spins so there’s no way to get purchase with pliers. I keep a small wrench in my tool kit to remove the wheels when needed.
In addition to that I use a kryptonite lock and make sure I attach it through my bike frame and something really solid. If you try to lock to a sign, try to pull the sign out of the ground first and maybe check if you can use your fingers to remove the bolt. I like kryptonite because of their insurance program but there are plenty of solid lock brands out there. I’ve had good luck with Abus and Axa as well.
Lastly bike index , project 529 or a similar local org can act as a deterrent or method of getting your bike back if it’s stollen. I’ve got bike index stickers on all my bikes.
When a person’s first exposure to an idea comes from an incurious, ignorant, or even actively malicious source it can take awhile for them to realize what they believed was wrong. It’s not always easy to realize that the source is bad, particularly as a young person without a lot of experience.
I don’t think the tone of your comment is particularly useful in light of that fact. Otherwise I agree with your point.
Thanks took me 3 rereads to find the typo 😅
One thing Alex Jones does is parrot things a caller said several episodes ago. He’ll vaguely talk about sources, shuffle some paper around for dramatic effect and claim that nobody died at Sandy Hook.
Lots of other folks do a similar thing. They will say something innocuous that some of their audience will construe to be rightwing or part of a conspiracy and praise them for it. From there they get pulled more and more into whatever ideology as their audience pills them harder and harder.
Plenty of Q anon folks claim movies and TV have secret messages in them. There are a bunch of theories about why fiction is partially true. One is, all these stories are priming the population for social control. Cultiral programming of some sort.
Another is the Bible. The flat earth conspiracy theory is based on a particularly literal reading of the Bible. The writers of the Torah probably believed in a flat earth. This isn’t surprising given their lack of sea faring history, most folks with large boats realize the earth isn’t flat because the bottom of the boat disappears first. Plenty of flat earthers believe that society is trying to hide that fact so we don’t realize we live in a divinely created snow globe. From there they concoct theories on how such a world could exist.
Freedom is a Verb by Daniel Kahn and the Painted Bird is a favorite of mine
I’ve been shopping at WinCo, it’s a further bike ride than Fred Meyer or Trader Joes but the prices are hard to beat. This year I’m looking at buying into a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). The one I’m looking at is $400 for 12 boxes of food spread across 24 weeks. We’ll see if it’s a good deal. I’ll be planting a garden soon too. Hoping to get a 3 sisters plot or two as well as some potatoes in containers
I don’t think it’s the source. I think it’s a tool of social control that enables the powerful to create a bare minimum willingness to be ruled. For a long time the doctrine of Christianity was the Divine Right of Kings. Now it’s the Prosperity Gospel. The books did not change but the people with all the money and power ensured the church leaders who served their interest had most of the money and thus followers.
If we didn’t have religion, some other social construct would arise, and I’d argue, has arisen to fulfill it’s role. Modern economic theory justifies the current power order in an unfalsifiable way that reminds me of religion.
Religion could be a liberatory force in society. In fact it has been. The liberation theology movement in South America and numerous heretical movements in the late medieval period are both examples of progressive Christian social movements.