Sure why would I question the wisdom of taking a mysterious pill offered to me by user TubularTittyFrog?

It’s monkey-brain thinking taking over

This is far more needlessly cruel than nature, monkeys are highly evolved for an extraordinarily challenging, diverse landscape with many threats and opportunities. They are not primitive enough to have their minds broken by cancerous ideologies that make them behave against the survival of themselves and their species.

What we are talking about is not primitive behavior, it is a hostile contagion composed of ideas rather than bacteria or viruses.

I know I am throwing stones in glass houses because I am saying this as a person from the US, but wow Germany is a really scary country, it seems like the culture is always extremely primed to radicalize its young men into serious violence around an obsession with masculine and machine strength/purity.

The US is a scarier country in most respects, and certainly has the same issue, but Germany is a much older culture and these brainworms seem to have ingrained deeper into their cultural mindset in some ways.

Are leftist movements growing to a similar degree among young people in Germany?

What you are missing is that you think I am suggesting stochastic terrorism or something. That doesn’t scare the rich, they can always build a bigger fence and pay more security guards.

What scares the rich is when they see that the fault lines they are using to vent steam (redirect the suffering and anger) are beginning to close into a wall of solidarity, and we are beginning to realize that as much as we despise each other and can’t agree on religion, ideologies, values… whatever… that we realize that none of that matters until we all deal with the rich people problem.

Solidarity and a direct understanding of the class war we are in is what scares the rich.

I think anything meaningful has to start from local mutual aid networks, creates connections with your neighbors under the assumption that we need to take care of each other, we can’t assume the system will be functional.

Even if your goal isn’t directly to organize locally, it is a prerequisite to getting pretty much anything meaningful done (which I kind of hate because when people call it “organizing” they aren’t kidding, and I hate organizing things lol) because whatever meaningful thing you want to happen will inevitably be implemented on a human level through those local connections.

Better shower thought: When the rich push the cost of housing high enough that a good portion of a society is one or two crises away from being homeless the best economic policy for fixing the situation is making the rich scared as fuck so whatever compromise we put on the table looks much more appealing than what the general public is threatening to do to the rich in the streets.

It’s not nice to beat yourself up like that, a shower should be a place to unwind not judge yourself.

Does giving to a panhandler help them or are you just enabling their lifestyle and making them dependent on that form of income which may prevent them from getting a real job?

Criminalizing homelessness and making it a sign of essentially being a pariah in society does far more to ensure homeless people become dependent on begging for money than giving money to homeless people does.

Most societies in history have had codified ways of beggars receiving food or basic needs from vendors, the current situation in at least the US is horrendously cruel.

If panhandling was 100% illegal with a felony charge for those panhandling and for those giving do you think more people would pull themselves out of being homeless or would they just suffer more?

Homelessness is not caused by laziness as the state of being homeless is exhausting both mentally and physically, thus codifying the act of being homeless and needing money as even more criminal doesn’t do anything to stop people from falling into homelessness and getting stuck there. What causes people to fall into homelessness and extreme poverty and get stuck there is how obscenely cruel our society is structured and how if you fall down everybody around you starts kicking you because that is just what we do when people fall down.

It doesn’t really matter what a homeless person uses the money for that you give them or that the homeless person might think “oh this is a good spot to panhandle” if you give them money in that spot, these are trivial little details of the day, they have nothing to do with what is crushing that human being down (especially when you live in the richest country on earth like I do, and we have plenty enough resources to go around if we cared to tackle wealth inequality).

Yes, WW1 was taught to me in school as coming out of a tense political situation that spiraled out of control before anyone knew what was happening, almost sort of like a freak natural disaster.

Everything made so much more sense when I read Gravity’s Rainbow with the way it portrayed the world wars as inevitable horrendous colonial violence turned inwards (which was bound to happen eventually). At first I was really confused why Pynchon included so much about the Herero peoples of Southern Africa, what did they have to do with WW2? Then I started to learn more history, I read the great article in the guardian on the 100th anniversary of WW1 about how the violence and genocide of colonialism was a direct path to the mass killing and violence of WW1

https://theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war

It isn’t gambling for the rich though, more like the big loud distraction (that happens to kill lots of people) put on to distract everybody else from them robbing us all blind (on both sides of whatever war you can imagine).

To be fair, war is actually a lot like gambling, most of the time it is boring sameness run through with a constant low level anxiety and then when something changes it happens abruptly with no warning. The difference is that when the unusual punctuates the boredom and you win in gambling you get money but when the jackpot sounds on the slot machine of war and something unexpected happens it usually means you are about to die.

Wait… what happens if you use the Hamas recognition software on Netanyahu…….?

Cover it up probably

What really scares me is that Ireland was a prototype for british colonialism and the Palestinian genocide is clearly a similar a prototype, and it terrifies me what it is a prototype for.

Everybody who is cool with Palestinians getting slaughtered like this have no idea that this is a pilot project for authoritarian violence that will be administered in the future and everyone should be terrified because virtually everyone will be a target of it.

That insecurity is not inherent to straight men, but rather rampant among them

How brave of you to make the point “Not All Men!”

Why would we judge heterosexual masculinity by insecurity?

I don’t know, maybe because I am a heterosexual man and I have met countless heterosexual men and one of the most common threads that makes heterosexual men stand out from other people is their deeply ingrained insecurity and propensity to project it with regimes of control and violence?

And ok… to calm the all the men having temper tantrums I am not saying men are inherently…. well anything but is undeniable that the constructed male heterosexual identity is imbued with what I am describing. Our jobs as heterosexual men is to demolish that construction of violence that we were taught (which as you brought up, someone like Nick Offerman does effectively through characters), of course it isn’t inherent to “being a man” , unlike bigots I am not insulting the mental capacity of men by pretending like they don’t have a choice of how to behave, but rather pointing out that heteronormative masculinity is an extremely problematic construct that we must intentionally dismantle and rebuild in more healthy ways for everyone.

Part of doing that is taking the piss out of heterosexual men drowning in insecurity that they impose on everyone else through sexism, driving massive pickups that are custom designed to kill children in a car accident, mass shootings (~99% of mass shooters in the US are, surprise!, heterosexual white men!) talking over other people constantly, pretending the ideas put forward by women are theirs, desiring to possess a partner as an object not a human being with a brain, confusing displays of the capacity for violence as a display of a confidence in their masculinity, taking up as much space as possible in public, demanding to settle disputes with other men through violence and using the threat of that those men will no longer be real men if they refuse….

….how much do I have to go on?

By making fun of the worst aspects of heterosexual men like Donald Trump I am punching up at a thing that needs some punching I think. If this were punching down at a vulnerable group without power in the societies they inhabit ok that would be a different conversation than punching up at the category of people that controls almost every power structure and power dynamic in society wouldn’t it?

As long as we are arguing about the various reasons he is unfit to serve, and also being careful not to throw our trans friends under the bus in the process, I’m good!

Also Donald Trump is one of the straightest, most heterosexually normative men alive if we measure heterosexual masculinity in terms of insecurity, which I think is a reasonable way to quantify heterosexual masculinity. I mean, describing thermonuclear explosive yields of nuclear bombs in terms of kilotons of TNT is a reasonable way of talking about abstract regimes of force we can’t directly grasp, so why not kilotons of insecurity to describe the toxic yields of bigots?

using a devastating neurological diseases as an insult, is wrong, but using it a a reason that he shouldn’t run a country is fair.

I don’t necessarily disagree but you also run the risk of distracting from the most dangerous part about him. He is a fascist, that is what is wildly dangerous about him and as much as it is fun to make fun of fascists for being dumbshits, it isn’t a lack of mental capacity that leads to fascism. Those two things are perpendicular and as tempting as it is to equate fascism with stupidity the far more terrifying truth is that it only really equates with ignorance.

If I was I sure as hell hope that an intersectional feminist would slap me upside the face and point out that it is impossible for a person who is trans to be the Queen Of England without being an extremely problematic figure from the perspective of LGTBQ+ people and people fighting colonialism in general (which includes feminism inherently hence the intersectionality).

They would also point out that just using “they” instead of “he or she” does no great injustice to people who identify as one of the two accepted status quo genders because it gets people to immediately retort that a heterosexual person in a position of power was not gendered immediately in discussion and instead referred to with the pronoun “they”, which naturally leads to an opportunity to point out how creepy the structure of the english language is with it’s obsession to immediately box people and identities into male or female.

As a final point I would like to point out that any given trans person who identifies as a Queen is automatically cooler than the Queen Of England. If the trans person can create dope ass baked goods they are automatically 2x as cooler. If they can skateboard too than the effect is exponential leading to a minimum 8x coolness multiplier.

If I was standing next to a disposed dictator from possibly the most brutal modern empire who was not overthrown but instead given control over a massive amount of real estate and just let free to do whatever they want as a filthy rich person… I would protect my balls too you don’t know what someone unhinged like that is going to do and you KNOW there isn’t going to be consequences for them so more than anyone else in the world they have zero fear about going for a nut kick.

Besides the whole English royalty thing is such a lame game of Simon says where rich insular people copy the aesthetics of other rich insular people to accrue more power, it is just like high school, so there could easily be a “Royal Nutcracker” that royalty does when men are around them with their balls uncovered and nobody would bat an eye, not the British public, not the news media, not British politicians… they would all just sigh and say “That’s our queen!” and laugh at you as you reeled in pain.

What?