I never said we get what we think we’re refusing to pay for, just that Americans think they can get something for nothing.

This is a thing at my university (I work there). I talked to one of the library folks about it years ago. She explained that (a) they would like to keep way more of the books but there’s not enough funding to have the space or staff for it–our school is in constant and recently much more intense financial crisis, laying off all kinds of people (except deans and provosts); (b) a lot of this stuff literally nobody wants, like 4th and 5th and 10th copies of mediocre textbooks rehashing the content done much better by other texts, and © yes, if I wanted to fill my car with books and rescue them I was welcome to do so.

This is what celebrity culture does to women.

Definitely that everyone should be centrist.

A lot of it (definitely not all of it) seems to be that Americans want things and don’t want to pay for them. They demand care for the elderly but refuse to pay what it costs to staff a decent facility. They want healthcare but refuse to pay what healthcare workers are worth. But far more than that, they refuse to pay more than absolutely minimal taxes, unless they are terrified into doing so–fear of foreigners, Black people, immigrants, communism, etc. They’ve been believing politicians for decades who promise them the moon with no tax increases.

So Americans want healthcare but refuse to vote for a candidate who will divert money from cops or weapons toward making it affordable. They want college education for all their kids but keep voting for candidates who are Tough On Crime and Tough On Government Corruption while dodging questions about funding public education. They want better wages and jobs but keep voting for “pro business” candidates who remove regulations so companies can outsource the jobs to nations with cheaper labor. They want cheaper prices on everything but keep voting for candidates who block antitrust regulations and remove barriers to shareholder stock buybacks.

There’s just enough distance between the voting decisions and their consequences that voters can convince themselves–they’re motivated to–that the consequences are not connected to their decisions, and they’re always provided with a raft of rationalizations in case they figure it out. It’s motivated reasoning on top of ignorance. Like all good cons, these prey on the selfishness and greed of the hundred million or so marks.

I knew someone who grew up very poor in rural coastal Alaska. Something like this was her idea of a great time: when she and her sisters found a bloated seal washed up in the beach they used it as a trampoline.

Take my upvote, you monster.

Badge of honor

Oh, cool. Until now I thought “rough sleeping” was just the British term for homeless (TIL).

“I will not eat the green eggs and government cheese…”

I think that is a reasonable take. It is s huge jump, in many ways, so I believe it is much more dangerous than other capitalist “innovations”.

Yeah, there has been a movement in recent decades to redefine racism, sexism, etc. As only applying to stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination by a person from a dominant group toward people from a marginalized group. To some extent I get that–that is why anyone ever started caring about racism etc.–and language evolves. If we as a society decide that is the only set of valid definitions, I’ll go with it, because I care more about the struggle for equality than about the words used in that process.

That said, my issue with this usage is that it is imprecise and bundles some extra judgments. This use of racism requires an extra assessment of the power dynamics between the groups each of the parties belongs to (and sometimes identifying that is a quagmire itself). I’d prefer keeping those judgments separate. For example, maybe responding to this racist troll by saying that some kind of racism cause and deepen harm a lot more than others, and he is ignoring that fact due to his own racism.

There are lots of things going on at once and all of them are valid. I struggle, too. My life is pretty good, from a global standard, while many, many others’ lives are much worse. Happiness is wildly unevenly distributed.

Well, I guess I was warned.

Thanks for responding. I also feel sorry for this frog, and I am happy to see others in the thread saying that when frogs are randomly born like this they seem to do OK.

Reasonable take, but the last part (“faster-growing”) is huge here. The sheer scale and multipliers on the bad things caused by AI are far beyond most (all?) previous technologies used by capitalists.

For the non-German speakers (via online translation because me neither)

The sign says “energy plants” (or crops)

The text: A schematic representation (?) of my social skills

I think it’s only 3 of the 4

I don’t think I was ever really a part of either of these trends, but my memory is that it started out as the game, then some white supremacists started to use it as their symbol. My hope is that the second association has broken down a bit for most people; I haven’t seen any pics on social media etc. of white supremacists doing this for a couple of years, so maybe the kids can have their game back.

I say this not as an insult (I promise) but as a genuine question: Were you sober when you made this comment?