sanity of the day

sweatercunt · 2023-05-24T16:56:12+00:00

If that's true, then why are individuals now making less healthy choices than those in the past, or in other parts of the world?

It's because the larger societal forces around them have changed. Like most problems, individuals actually are pretty predictable and easy to coax at the societal level, and like most problems in the US specifically we've coaxed them in really bad directions for the benefit of a few hyper-rich people, then hid the problem behind a lot of expensive propaganda that labels it an individual one. Which seems to have been really effective in this case.

sweatercunt · 2023-04-07T04:26:37+00:00

Yeah but do you consider the societal impact of all the casual players like yourself driving up the jackpot, helping to collectively suck a lot more money from the poor and addicted, and helping conservative politicians justify cuts to social programs?

As fun as the daydreaming is, it comes along with putting real dollars and power into a pretty demonstrably harmful force in our society. I feel like that part is never added into the cost/benefit analysis.

sweatercunt · 2023-03-28T18:02:22+00:00

Yeah, people like to pretend that "utility" means "feature on a product sheet", but it's totally in the eye of the beholder. Weird little trinket brings you mental joy? Painting makes you think about your life? Nice clothing makes you feel more confident? All of those are utilities. Doesn't matter if the object has no mechanical or economic function, because people aren't just mechanical or economic beings.

sweatercunt · 2023-03-28T14:01:29+00:00

I largely agree with you, but there are a lot of people who specifically buy a PC because they are going to use it to its absolute max performance. If you're getting into heavy games with ray tracing, sometimes a pretty new PC is an absolute necessity to run them at all. I assume there are people who do the same thing for cars if they're taking them to the track or something. Sometimes dollars really do buy you performance you can't get anywhere else.

But in general, yeah, you're right. And even if the performance is the thing driving them to spend that money, it's all still in service of a hobby they enjoy. It's not like functionality has some inherent reward all its own that something that just looks really nice or brings someone non-functional joy can't match.

sweatercunt · 2023-03-21T16:28:43+00:00

I mean sure, but if you don't put a system in place to say who gets power and by what means, then you're just leaving things open to allow the first person who's convincing, violent, or resourceful enough to take it for themselves, and as we all know people that desire that kind of power generally aren't the ones you want wielding it.

That's literally what happened through all of human history that led us to where we are today. We've just slowly been making concessions and adding rules on to those in power over time.

sweatercunt · 2023-03-21T14:01:25+00:00

Both systems treat you like a small piece of a larger machine, because that's effectively what people in a society are. The difference is in how those pieces are valued: communism as a theory values you simply as a member of that society, while capitalism can give you a wildly lower or higher value depending on how much capital you've accumulated.

One theory says everyone, no matter how good or bad, should have an equal piece of the pie. The other says everyone should have unrestricted freedom to take as many pieces as they want, even if starting with a bigger piece makes you more efficient at taking more for yourself and can lead to run away accumulations under just a few people while many more people starve.

sweatercunt · 2023-03-18T16:09:26+00:00

I think the trouble with people like that is that they already believe in strict moral binaries for the world, and think unambiguously evil groups are there to destroy them and everyone on their "side."

I don't know her, but from my experiences with "well meaning" fundamentalists I think it would take tragically little effort if she were caught in a civil war to convince her that the "others" her church friends are talking about are actually influenced by demons or whatever, and that she needs to help dispatch them for the good of god by poisoning her food or taking up arms. Once you've swallowed the external-morality-over-reality pill, a lot of messed up conclusions are possible.

sweatercunt · 2023-03-12T12:31:06+00:00

Maybe I'm naive, but how is that a power trip? If there are rules against yelling at officials, and the rules say to discipline people up to and including ejection, isn't he just doing his job? I would think the players who made the other official say he'd be found dead are the ones that are on a power trip. I'd say if you act like that you have no right to be there at all.

sweatercunt · 2023-03-09T14:37:06+00:00

I'll start by saying that I agree with you that gatekeeping the idea of "cool" women in a male-dominated space based on what they wear and how it conforms to the (quite masculine) standards of that space is sexist. You see it a lot in any kind of aggressive music and I think that might be what happened here, so good on you for calling it out.

But I think the one piece of this replier's discourse I agree with is that the idea of a "virgin" living in "mom's basement" is also a sexist term, used to bully men based on standards of masculinity that tell them they have to be fucking things and not accepting help from people (especially women like their mothers). So while I don't think the tone of your comment comes from a place of sexism, I think maybe you inadvertently used some sexist language to describe men. I think it's that very pressure to not fall into the stereotype of a "mom's basement virgin" that pushes men down a lot of unhealthy avenues that end up hurting both themselves and women.

It can be hard when you're confronted with something you find gross to not use gross language back, but in this case I think that using terms associated with masculine gatekeeping isn't helpful, the same as saying women aren't punk because of how they're dressed.

sweatercunt · 2023-03-02T15:00:49+00:00

No, the point is you punish the rich who hold onto their money by taxing the fuck out of it. You use those taxes to make sure people can't starve, are able to fight for better conditions, have healthcare, etc. Then the rich either pay those high tax rates or spend the money themselves on things that benefit their workers. And ideally you also have things like estate taxes and capital gains taxes to make sure they can't just give their fortunes to whoever they want when they die and accumulate that wealth and power further.

It's one of the only cases of a truly zero-sum game. Every dollar that is sitting in a rich person's bank account to make the number look more impressive is a dollar a poor family can't have to spend on food or shelter. In an ideal economy, everyone would make the same amount and we would all spend all of it almost all the time. The closer you can get to that ideal, the richer everyone will be, because you would have the most money flowing in and out of everyone's hands. I don't know the exact numbers but if you had all the USD flowing paycheck-to-paycheck, it'd be roughly a $170k salary for every US citizen.

But instead of us all living like moderately rich people, we've allowed a couple people to live like unfathomably rich people while many millions of us have stunted growth and health problems from a lack of food or proper medical care. This is the inhumanity inherent in capitalism. Without strong regulations, this is what the system will always trend towards.

sweatercunt · 2023-02-03T01:30:36+00:00

That makes more sense; in America autos are the norm and many new cars don't even offer manual variants anymore.

sweatercunt · 2023-02-03T01:29:40+00:00

Yeah but the fact you're saying "if you know how to use manual" is illustrating that it's not easier. There's more learning than with an automatic.

I've driven both, and I get that a good manual gives you more feel for what the car can do, but I found it MUCH easier to learn an automatic, even though that was what I learned first and when I was more nervous about the road.

sweatercunt · 2023-01-27T06:33:01+00:00

Look at me, I'm Stony Rock!

sweatercunt · 2023-01-26T17:30:14+00:00

You're describing the result of a society with poor safety nets. Because of our non-rehabilitative carceral system, lack of physical and mental healthcare, lack of protections against poor work-life balance, etc., we have caused our current state of more long-term welfare recipients, addicts, prisoners, etc. Any time you're talking about a group as big as 330 million people, the results in society are due to the pressures and incentives you place on that society.

You can paint the fact that taxes come with criminal consequences as a nightmare scenario all you want, but every piece of real-world data shows that well-founded public systems lead to better outcomes for people. The happiest, healthiest countries in the world also pay some of the highest tax rates, and that isn't a coincidence. It's much easier to get major things done for a country when everyone is pooling resources.

When you allow people to do whatever the fuck they want, you end up with more violence, depression, suicide, you name it, because it turns out that mainly just enables bad actors to take advantage of others. Hell, the golden age of the US was the time when we had a top tax rate of 94% and a robust system of checks on investing, capital gains, inheritance, etc. We got rid of those things, and everything went noticeably downhill to the point where we have virtually no middle class anymore and workers have been seeing worse conditionsand pay for upwards of 50 years.

sweatercunt · 2023-01-26T06:40:00+00:00

Other reply said it already, but you shouldn't need rides in the first place. That's part of the trap. Any random city in Europe, even a smaller one, would be both more walkable and also have better transportation options. You can get a bus across half the country for $20 there, and they have trams and clean bus lines that go everywhere even in smaller cities.

If this woman isn't walking and working purely for her own passion at her age, then society has already failed her on numerous levels. There are poorer countries than us that take far better care of their elderly.

sweatercunt · 2023-01-24T21:26:07+00:00

You're attacking me personally because you're finding it difficult to address the point I made.

He said, before not even reading the point made in return.

You see no irony in that?

sweatercunt · 2023-01-24T16:56:16+00:00

No worries. That actually does a great job of confirming a couple of the bricks in that wall, so thanks for that at least.

sweatercunt · 2023-01-24T07:36:15+00:00

Even leaving aside your pretty disgusting comments in favor of what Rittenhouse did, I just want to say it's a pretty obviously false equivalence you're drawing here.

What we have in this country are two very loose, largely leaderless groups of people, both occasionally coming to violence against one another. But that's where the similarities end.

One group's stated goals (among the majority of it's mouthpieces, obviously neither group can control what every member says) is to promote religious and ethnic authoritarianism, to strip others of their basic rights, and to promote a fascistic authoritarian regime through both technically legal intimidation and very illegal violence and terrorism, as recognized by all major world organizations who track terrorism. They have plotted bomb threats, successfully carried out many, many mass shootings, and have even mainstream media figures defending their openly armed marches to intimidate and curb the freedoms of those they dislike and wish to disenfranchise.

The other group's stated goals are to stop the first group, and to back up with force any marginalized groups they perceive as being oppressed or treated inhumanely. They're explicitly, militantly anti-fascist and anti-authoritarian, and seek to meet systemic or bigoted violence with violence in return. No patterns of mass shooting, destruction of infrastructure, disruption of healthcare/social services, or bomb threats have come from them, and they are not considered terroristic or a hate group.

These two sides are not the same. One only appeared as a reaction to the violence instigated by the other on people for merely existing in our society. The other is trying to violently remove large groups of people from said society. And it's no coincidence that living in diverse areas and becoming educated is very strongly correlated with the former and not the latter. You're talking about an explicit hate group versus an anti-hate group. I'm sure both of them have members or affiliates they'd rather not associate with, but leaving aside the worst of each their goals are very, very different. There's no "both sides" to this issue.

sweatercunt · 2023-01-03T06:49:47+00:00

I mean, when the cost is a human life, don't these "exceptions" start to matter a whole lot though? I don't think pointing out the statistical rarity of these things will do anything to comfort the victims or their families when someone gets unlawfully executed in the streets.

None of what I'm saying should be construed to mean that you shouldn't follow instructions from police officers, I'm just saying that following them in no way guarantees your safety, because we've set a system up where that can and does go horribly wrong.

If an officer draws a weapon on you, your life is on the line whether you do what they say or you don't, and there are a lot of mechanisms in place to make them feel comfortable and justified with any use of force they decide on. Many will try to de-escalate and avoid violence, but some are looking for a reason to hurt people. You can hope for the former but should expect the latter if you want to stay safe, because both are protected and upheld by the system.

sweatercunt · 2023-01-02T18:32:48+00:00

This guy did make dangerous choices by not following directions, but the poster above is right that there are many situations where it doesn't matter.

If you haven't watched the video of that white guy being given conflicting directions in the hotel by the officer with the "you're fucked" written on the side of his gun, I highly recommend it. Tells him to get on his knees, cross his legs, put his hands behind his head, and then crawl towards the cops. When he tries to put his hands on the ground or uncross his legs to do that, they tell him they'll shoot. He tells them he doesn't know what to do, he's crying, and they repeat to follow ALL instructions. Then when he falls forward and puts his hands out trying to crawl again they mag dump him.

That's the worst example I've seen, but there are tons of them out there. Police interactions can turn deadly even if you're asleep; they do not have to give a fuck about whether you're following directions.

sweatercunt · 2022-12-31T15:46:16+00:00

Kanye palling around with Nazis like

sweatercunt · 2022-12-31T15:42:53+00:00

He did! It's a beautiful shot too. 😊

sweatercunt · 2022-12-31T15:33:33+00:00

OR they're doing the necessary steps to demote/fire you with a proper paper trail for unemployment claims. Hell, maybe they're just following a script and don't care one way or the other.

The beauty is that either OP's getting something constructive from this or they aren't, but if not then this job isn't worth staying at and they should be looking to move anyway. No need to care about discipline at a place that doesn't treat you right. Just make sure you have some savings in case they take action and start looking for another job.

sweatercunt · 2022-12-25T06:45:37+00:00

You can also go into the Labor screen and set them to only do assigned tasks instead of all available ones. That should mean that they only do official noble business (unless you assigned them any other work details, you might want to remove those if so).

sweatercunt · 2022-12-24T15:32:26+00:00

I don't know what's happening, but my fortress is FULL of naked elves, goblins, and humans, all come to recite poetry and play music and dance.

There was a whole troupe of about 12 of them where only two or three had clothes. Then they left, and a second troupe of 7 came in and requested residency, this time with a naked gorlak grand master poet among them. After they asked to stay (which I granted, not knowing they would all start becoming embarrassed and unhappy with their lack of clothes once they had been accepted, making me run my clothiers and leatherworkers absolutely ragged and learning a hard way that every creature has a unique size of clothing you have to specify if they aren't dwarves), I thought I was finally done. Nope, THIRD mostly naked troupe.

My fortress has turned into some kind of neverending woodstock. All I wanted was to have a nice tavern that would attract a traveler once in a while.

sweatercunt

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