This is gonna turn into the byzantine empire if we keep up with all these endless complications.
All these diseases coming out, I freaking swear...I just want to lock my door and shut out the world he's ruining.
Gosh that all sounds ghastly. So big city liberals pay bookoo bucks in property taxes, show up to PTA meetings, school district meetings, talk about what they pay, kids get better educated, become liberals mostly, grow up, repeat; meanwhile, rural kids get little more than dirt to learn with, worse education, pity allowance from big city liberals working their magic in congress, getting them some money from the department of education, at least something more, but it's not enough, so they grow up poorly educated, become wide open to the sophistry and propaganda of the far right, and now they get picked clean off the countryside, ushered into a voting booth, they vote for a fascist who now moves to eliminate the department of education thus further threatening the quality of their education and what little extra money they get. Am I getting that right? I'm green party so I just find this all very disorienting.
My understanding is that it's the taxes from the surrounding neighborhoods where homes are located that fundamentally pay for schools.
I once thought it was that simple so I understand where people on here are coming from on all this. But after ten years in the San Joaquin valley, ag central, I can tell you, having grown up in Seattle and thus seeing the contrast, there is a distinct power in fundamental formal education and when that is lacking it doesn't matter what happens to them, the powers-that-be always know how gullible they are and will mold them like playdoh. I think the schools need to be funded by the central government not local governments. Big city liberals should have to put up frankly with their local neighborhood schools being taken down a few notches through evenly spreading education funds across jurisdictions if they don't want schools way out in the boondocks to be as vapid as one finds them. If you won't pay for their education my attitude is don't complain about their politics and try your best not to complain about their intelligence. I find that hard myself - I get frustrated all the time with the people in this small town, but I still try to remind myself what I've learned about education itself and I try to have compassion. Maybe that's what ten years out in the boondocks teaches a Seattleite.
Well I think they really only did two things : A) appeal to far right people with their roots waaaay out in the boondocks mostly northward rather than southwestward using stuff like dog whistles, and B) use doublespeak to simultaneously appeal to, draw in, and superficially radicalize the more centre right types just enough to get their vote over the top, to have a substantial base, and to be able to call it 'a mandate'. I mean they really went out into the deep country for campaigning.
Trump makes a variety of compliment sandwiches. It's hard to tell after a while just what kind of sandwich it is.
Sounds like that movie the Obamas made 'Leave the World Behind'. Guys... I think this is it. The trump administration has gone idiocratic accelerationist. Brace. Prepare. If you don't like words like "prepper" then use the environmentalist term "adapt in place". Know your community. Community is what will save us. Make a new human connection in person. At least one. When you achieve that go beyond it. Become a pillar of your community, a fixture, and do it as quickly as possible. Be a benefit.
Well the republicans are in some kind of hyperfascist accelerationist mode so I'm not sure exactly how much time we have to give them.
I don't understand what they hate about the (now) old world order, what they were and I think still calling "the new world order". I understand what I hate about it, I just don't understand what they hate about it. THEY are the new world order now, they and their dictator friends abroad. Whenever there is a new world order forms (yes, deictically it's relative to the formation of world orders in their historical contingency) it seems like it is announced often with that exact term "new world order". It would be incredibly ironic if he were to use those words today. But it's as if he could. I would so rather be under George H.W. Bush's adminstration though, if I were to pick my poison. But I think right now the hegemony belongs to the PRC, from a descriptivist standpoint (not prescriptivist) - he's a PRC pawn.
They're doing some weird things right now I think. I was posting a big paragraph about peak oil on slrpnk.net a couple hours ago and that's when slrpnk went down. Maybe I'm just paranoid.
I started voting green party when I realized that that was the system - lesser of two evils. To me, it doesn't feel like the least of all evils, it just feels a little disappointing as a third party almost inherently. But then I get a second wind sometimes and concert myself to making something of it.
I am aware, but it makes me finicky. Irks me irrationally.
Technically that would make king charles my head of state seeing as I live in California. Not into that. A lot of pros/advantages though, I'll say that much.
It's the consumption of an idea. There's very little in the way of substance at Starbucks. I achieved more than any Starbucks order by grinding my folgers classic roast just now while using an unbleached compostable coffee filter and having cleaned the coffee maker with all natural biodegradeable dish soap. Can't afford good coffee grounds right now, but recently I had 'Punk Goes The Bunny', Billie Joe Armstrong's (from Green Day) coffee brand.
But here I am wondering if I'm just consuming a bunch of ideas myself. Consuming the idea of Punk Rock for instance, or eco-friendliness, or health. But then I catch myself and say "Those are tangible benefits." Anything more likely to make me listen to The Clash is a positive, anything that's not gonna put bleach in my body, anything that's gonna be clean for making coffee but without such a residue of dangerous chemicals as is typical with cleaners, and anything to add to my compost.
Like russian nesting dolls. Just starbucks all the way down.
All I can say is freedom isn't free. Maybe that's something Canadians need to learn, I don't know - I don't really want to assume. But I got a cascadian flag tattoo on my left arm like a soldier's patch for a reason. I've been thinking in neomedieval military terms since I was a teenager at an alternative high school in the late 2000s.
Freedom needs to be constantly defended. If you can't give up any kind of tribute to a governing authority or series of governing authorities to defend it for you or don't find any existing entity as authentically defending it then you frankly have to defend it yourself. Same principle for arguing in favor of participatory democracy - if you don't participate in democracy in some meaningful way you are bound to lose it.
Shrodingers rat penis situation sounds like.
We need to look at this thing called 'adapting in place'. I think this is just such a complicated situation that people just need to figure out what's going on around them, at least for the time being. Radical simplification - corporate greed, yes, but it's still complicated as to what exactly we do about it.
Walz' couch reference was sex negative
Even if JD Vance did some kind of thing on a couch turning it into some kind of scandal is not in line with the principles of sex positivity. That whole discourse is a form of shaming that doesn't need to be put out there. I can't believe people still vote Democrat. Learn your lesson - they are just another fascist party. They're not advanced enough on mental health issues, Israel and Gaza, lgbtqia issues, or much of anything else. All the literature is there and they don't read it thoroughly enough or value its role enough. Not nearly enough.
Does it seem like there is a major food crisis in the US right now?
Food bank only had raisins. My food stamps were cut by two thirds. Inflation is way up. Specific shortages. I asked some people around me and they're also struggling. No emergency announcements. Feels like a cover up. I heard US shale oil is peaking. All this and I live in the central valley of California, ag central. I should have food easily, instead it's a struggle.
How should I approach having relatively obscure points of lack of privilege?
- I'm a 2 on the kinsey scale; people seem to think there is just gay, straight, and bi and are less exposed to the idea of a spectrum.
- I'm passing white; part mesoamerican, always grew up knowing I was part native american then took two DNA tests and it was confirmed at least that I was part native mesoamerican.
- I have always struggled with getting a handle on my gender and biological sex whether it was my year of identifying as nonbinary or people mistaking me for a female throughout my life or my body issues around whether I am feminine or masculine in one way or another; as I cover in another post I am currently trying to wrestle mentally and emotionally with my seemingly feminine pelvic bone despite being male assigned at birth.
These issues are obscure enough to be ignored by basically everyone, so with more conservative types I have to suffer gaslighting, covert and overt abuse, and interpersonal neglect, and with more 'liberal' types I have to suffer a different kind of rejection wherein it is denied that my issues qualify as oppression because there are simply limits to what any one liberal is educated on.
What are some good tips for dealing with this kind of life situation?
Is it possible I am intersex if I apparently have a very wide female pelvic bone and everything else is male?
I was assigned male at birth but have increasingly started to notice over the years that other guys don't have a big notch on either side of their torsos like I do. It's my pelvic bone. I would go to a doctor to see what they had to say but they've seen me plenty of times and said absolutely nothing about being intersex and now I live in a rural conservative area and they don't seem to diagnose the same way in hardly anything that is a conservative third rail. I just seem to have a really wide pelvis just like a female. Everything else seems male. I am a very normal weight so it's not fat tissue - its clearly bone. I just feel gaslit over it and have been trying to gauge perceptions people have of me in my life in order to get on with things. I hate to turn to the internet but this is driving me crazy. I need something to work with, somewhere to start.
How can open source hardware be a movement if the raw materials still have to be mined and factory produced?
Am I not understanding FOSH (free and open source hardware)? I have always dreamed of open source hardware but it has always seemed unshakeably and fundamentally reliant on for instance massive open pit mines mining all over the world in finite dwindling supply wrecking local ecosystems every element necessary for computer components, factories able to produce at scale fueled by an enormous amount of energy from god knows where, massive pollution and waste every step of the way, and every other ill of extraction and production which seems like it can only be handled by large scale industry almost entirely capitalist for the foreseeable future. Am I missing something? Is it a pipe dream? Even if we find a way to get to a point where we can sustainably and ethically develop any new hardware we need, won't that require persisting in the mean time in the present capitalist paradigm physically? Is this just kind of a microcosm and reification of the problem of democratizing the economy anyway?
How could a three to five minute level of urban planning be incorporated into larger city systems?
My grocery store is 0.25 miles away. That's the farthest I go within a month apart from the bank. I realize that it would be ableist to expect everyone to carry two tote bags full of groceries back from somewhere that far regularly walking, but like what if there could be a service for disabled people to fetch groceries that way in the neighborhood? I saw some old people walking recently in my neighborhood and was considering doing that for them in exchange for some pocket change I needed for the laundromat right next to the grocery store. The farthest I go on a regular basis is a 25 minute walk to get my cashier's check my landlord requires for rent. The buses in this town are too slow and inconsistent for that to make sense for me. I'm actually very proud that I don't drive and wish I could make errands for physically disabled people given my fitness.
I find myself comfortable month to month staying within that 0.25 square mile area. I recently went about 100 miles west to a California beach for a day and night and I feel like my ordinary lifestyle made it that much more profound in contrast. It's strange how that sort of compression and expansion of a sense of everyday space can change the phenomenology of a place, make something feel bigger in an odd way. The ocean was so amazing.
And so it just kind of seems like there's no singular amount of minutes that should define your lifestyle but rather like maybe concentric circles with no absolute outer bound. And so this is very open-ended. Sort of musing here. I could be wrong. I work from home.
Any suggestions for overcoming addiction to capitalist big tech social media and streaming etc?
I've tried getting into peertube to have something to watch. I'm exploring copyleft music on open audio / funkwhale. I'm on here in lemmy as of this week. I'm playing with mastodon and the fediverse. I've tried studying psychology and psychology-adjacent territory like Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault and Derrida so I can break down what the Facebook algorithms are doing to me, how pop and mainstream music is designed and produced in conjunction with advertising to screw with our heads and make us buy things, how YouTube music suggestion algorithms screw with my head and ultimately make me buy things, and I've tried to start learning to code on a basic level at least so I can convert my chromebook to Ubuntu and hopefully my android phone, which I've paid off completely, to some kind of fully open source OS.
I've let my Netflix subscription wither away after just not paying it and try to not care about it anymore. I have no idea what to do about Amazon or Amazon Prime. I have some very important movies like 'Unhinged' and 'Donnie Darko' on there. I need to buy certain things in the present framework of my life right now, things that, in a small town with a particular disability keeping me from driving, I can only get on Amazon.
I'm doing a lot. But I still find myself jonesing for that death consciousness of mindlessly scrolling through Facebook totally vulnerable to an AI superpower extracting maximum profit from me perpetually. Moderation no longer seems remotely realistic. I can't shut the machine out. Has anybody found anything else I could try? I'm trying to find as many little strategies as possible.
It seems like I feel safer now in the inner city than the suburb I grew up in
Is it just me or do poor neighborhoods of the US have a safer vibe now and the suburbs like a distinctly threatening vibe? I live in a poor neighborhood and these days being somewhere like this and seeing like a gangbanger-ish car roll down the street doesn't make me nervous but a cop car definitely does kind of like how those same types of gangbanger-ish cars made me nervous when I was a middle class kid growing up in a nice neighborhood in the 2000s but police cars made me feel safe and protected. Like it's all switched for me. A few days ago I stayed a few nights at my dad's huge house in nice neighborhood and I was alone one night and felt extremely unsafe. I was so relieved to get back to my apartment alone in a poor neighborhood. Has anyone else had this experience of such a transition over the last twenty years or so?