Mexico is a bad example IMO. The Zapatistas are right there. That’s a pretty significant bit of territory the Mexican State has very little control over.

The bone conducting ones make me nauseous so I got a pair of Bose open earbuds. They’re not as good in loud environments but that’s kinda the point. I ride and listen to music with them daily

I don’t know what that has to do with anything. I’m a lefty, life has never mugged me. I’m a leftist because bad things happen to everyone and the solutions isn’t to hurt people until they’re better people. Giving people time and resources just makes people and society better.

Because billionaires are morally good, hard working, and smart. If a poor person was all those things they wouldn’t be poor /s

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.

Netanyahu has propped up Hamas for decades in order to separate the West Bank from Gaza. There hasn’t been an election in Gaza for 18 years so nobody there had had the opportunity to choose an alternative anyway. Hamas didn’t even get the majority of chores in that election. Finally, plenty of people who don’t support Hamas, like queer folks and babies, are being indiscriminately murdered by the IDF.

The people in this photo are making a not uncomplicated but ultimately moral stance.

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.

I don’t think that’s how people work. An individual can decide to think critically, act selflessly, but when you’re talking about millions of people environment means so much more. A mass of people don’t just do anything. They are the result of their education, media, and religion. When all these things are shaped by people with all the money it’s no wonder that people are bigoted, short sighted, and disillusioned with politics. We live in an extremely sophisticated propaganda machine.

As long as people are sufficiently comfortable, things will continue as they are. Enough people need to find their material reality shitty enough that they’re no longer willing to eat the shit we’ve been fed all this time. Things haven’t been this concentrated since before the great depression. If we see a similar economic collapse. This time a collapse in the ad/tech market or obscene capital financialization, and we’ll finally see a similar backlash against capital. We just need to make sure we finish the job and the owners can’t slowly claw back political power again.

Say her name https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daphne_Caruana_Galizia

Maybe, “the blood rushed out of my head” would be a better line? Idk I’m not good at flirting

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.

Sure, subsidize producers and give people a UBI. Problem solved.

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.

One of my favorite extensions is vimium. It enables vim like navigation on web browsers. If you press ? It brings up a menu showing all the key bindings, it’s very helpful. Adding that and a hotkey highlighter would be a good way to document such programs. It’s too bad that sort of thing isnt a priority

It would be hilarious if all these apps were secretly just like vim. They all have complex hotkey setups that enable power users to get where they need to be in at most 3 key presses.

And the unititiated has to google to find where their god damn setting is actually located.

Honestly that would be great.

Yes, except a heat pump is capable of being more than 100% efficient because the using the power to move heat around is more efficient than converting power directly to heat

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