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No one gives a shit about the fate of labor qua labor at all.  How many people on this website would look at an white evangelical christian fundamentalist who voted for Trump twice, thinks Dems stole the 2020 election, laughs at videos of BLM and climate protesters getting run over when they try to block roads, and hates queers, muslims, and immigrants,  and go “oh that’s fine then, I’m in solidarity with him!” just because he works for an hourly wage?  

"ooooh nooooo but a rail strike around the holidays could cripple the economy" damn sounds like their labor is really really important and you should give them what they fucking want

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Be Gay NONBINARY!

DO CRIMES!!!!

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Yes, but! Municipal governments get lots of complaints about homeless people hanging around places that, e.g., sell food without chasing off homeless, or allow homeless to use restrooms.

This is in part because some people are scared of visible signs of poverty-unwashed/groomed bodies, torn clothing, etc., but also in part because a non-trivial fraction of homeless people are extremely disturbed, drugged out, aggressive, and treatment-avoidant and/or -resistant. I.e., serious and real threats to public safety!

The municipal governments, being under a lot of contradictory pressures (respect the homeless! Don't incarcerate them! Defend the police! Keep public space safe! Remove unsightly things!), and often not particularly competent, frequently blame the business for the problem instead of doing something expensive and/or controversial!!

Often, the business is not part of a large chain which can absorb losses and trouble, and so is deathly afraid of a municipal nuisance abatement or similar action! Often, municipalities have little oversight over their actions, particularly where they can plead "public safety" as a justification!

So when the police or planning department come around and say "we've had a lot of complaints about the homeless being a nuisance, we need you to help do something about it," the business owner cooperates!

So think about the entire system before blaming any one link in the chain. If these problems were easy to solve, they would have been.

Context: there is a homeless encampment across the tracks from this unmanned train station

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I don't think it's surprising at all. Of course people are going to create identities for themselves, entrench over them, and fight huge culture war battles with the identity-marker as the battle line. In modernity, with technology and *progress* uprooting all the old markers of identity - place, language, family, religion - people are desperate for new ones. The search for new, meaningful identities, whether small and bespoke or big and vaguely-general, is the story of the last two generations.

Fascinated by how "woke", already a nebulous, all-encompassing nothing word in the hands of the people mad at the word "woke", has now become the central motivation of everything to those people. Every story has to be seen in terms of "woke" or "anti-woke", it's now the only framing they have to relate to the world

Like, when Disney fired their CEO, they quickly decided it was all over how Bob Chapek was the "woke" one and they went back to the "non-woke" one Bob Iger and no other reason. Twitter is about Elon Musk rooting out "woke" employees. A thing happens, that crowd draws imaginary battle lines. Every minor business move, cultural decision, everything is, to people in a particular filter bubble another skirmish in a grand war over a vaguely defined concept that means literally nothing to anyone outside the bubble

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The strong already rule. What do you think petitioning the US is, other than a request for the 800-lb. Gorilla to help you?

A lot of people are really in favor of the rule of the strong, consequences be damned, huh?

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But the left has been doing this for ages. They've been hauling social media companies up to Capitol Hill for years and explicitly threatening to abolish / "reform" Section 230 unless the companies censor conservative positions and ideas harder. And that's only the most blatant example.

important thing understand about the GOP’s newfound hate-on for disney is that the Democrats aren’t really involved in it at all, it’s between Disney and the GOP. the understanding here is that disney has a lot of privileges due to cronyism, and the GOP is reminding them that those priviliges can be revoked – perhaps not immediately, but soon – if they don’t start acting like cronies again. it’s fundamentally just extortionism toward a lobby-dependent megacorp.

I’m actually not sure the GOP has given thought to the left response here, which is that if this works then it will work for them as well – once it’s acceptable to think and say these things everyone will say them, and it’s functionally impossible to please both parties at once on culture-war stuff, so the net result will probably just be that Disney loses its cozy relationship with regulators and legislators regardless of what they do, and then everybody’s unhappy. Ironically the best outcome! I don’t know if that will actually happen, but it’s definitely a possible outcome if the near-term gambit ends up being highly effective.

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I mean, fascists like unions. Just ones carefully vetted for ideological conformity, same as the bosses.

david fucking frum dragging fox news for hysteria today and trying to explain to people what the emergencies act actually means

never entirely sure how to feel about this sort of situation. I guess the more people on the right saying “guys wtf” the better? strange bedfellows tho

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...was the last frame purposely chosen to be twisted and hateful-looking? Cuz it's kinda undermining the message that the imageset is seemingly pushing...

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meanwhile in the Greatest Country on Earth™

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Thanks, I want to burn it with fire.

I think it would be fairer if health insurance existed that didn't cover any costs related to pregnancy/childbirth (except for abortion and complications thereof).

For a woman in the developed world, having a baby is definitely a choice, not an unpredictable, unavoidable, life-ruining catastrophe, so there's no reason to pay for it with insurance instead of just, like, saving up for a while.

If you're a woman who never intends to have kids, it seems unfair to put you on the hook to pay for some other woman's family dreams, which is what's happening when you're paying for maternity coverage that you'll never use.

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Cool!

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It's neither, it's Speculation.

This tracks.

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The nineteenth century was wild! I can't imagine what it must have been like, living before modern sanitation and health care.

An Example:

This rakish mf'er is General Charles Ferguson Smith (1807-1862). He graduated from West Point in 1825, and thirteen years later came back to serve as Commandant of Cadets, a post he held from 1838-1843. Officers he taught at West Point included:

Three Generals in Chief of all Union armies (U. S. Grant, W. T. Sherman, and Henry W. Halleck), two Union Chiefs of Artillery (William F. Barry and Henry Hunt), and the Union's Chief Engineer (Joh Newton)

The commanding generals on both sides of the First Battle of Bull Run (PGT Beauregard and Irvin Mcdowell), five other Union army commanders (George Thomas, Don Carlos Buell, John Pope, William Rosecrans, and Edward Canby), and one Confederate army commander (Earl Van Dorn)

The Confederacy's Chief Engineer (Jeremy Gilmer), Quartermaster General (Alexander Lawton), and Chief of Ordnance (Josiah Gorgas)

Eight Confederate corps commanders (James Longstreet, Richard S. Ewell, Gustavus W. Smith, A. P. Stewart, "Fighting Dick" Anderson, William Hardee, who also wrote the book on infantry tactics that both armies used to train during the first few years of the war, Edward "Allegheny" Johnson, and Carter L. Stevenson)

Seven Union corps commanders (Horatio Wright, James Ricketts, William B. Franklin, John Reynolds, George Sykes, Nathaniel Lyons, and the mathematical prodigy EOC Ord who, before the War also surveyed Los Angeles and Sacramento)

Eleven Union division commanders (Isaac Stevens, William Hays, Albion P. Howe, Israel "Fighting Dick" Richardson [yes, there were two "fighting Dicks" in the Civil war and one wasn't even named Dick] Abner Doubleday, Christopher Augur, Isaac Quinby, William T. H. Brooks, John Peck, George Getty, and the amazingly named Zealous B. Tower)

Eight Confederate division commanders (Lafayette McLaws, Franklin Gardner, John P. McCown, D. H. Hill, James Martin, Abraham Buford, Mansfield Lovell, and Bushrod Johnson)

He then served in the Mexican-American war as commander of an artillery battalion, and was placed in charge of policing Mexico City during the occupation.

When the Civil War came around, he was one of the four officers who Winfield Scott suggested would be suitable to command all Union Armies - and the only one who stayed loyal to the flag. The other three were Albert Sidney Johnston (who died commanding the Confederate Army at Shiloh), Joseph E. Johnston (who commanded several armies for the Confederacy) and a dude named Robert E. Lee.

He wasn't offered overall command, but instead was sent out west to command a division in the army of his former student, U.S. Grant. During the battle of Fort Donelson, Smith led a countercharge against a Confederate attack, screaming at his troops: "Come on, you damned volunteers, come on. You volunteered to be killed for love of country, and now you can be. You are only damned volunteers. I'm a soldier, and so don't want to be killed, but you all came to be killed and now you can be!"

All of that to say: this was a serious badass. So it was extra ridiculous when he died shortly before the battle of Shiloh: two weeks earlier he had skinned his shin jumping out of a boat. The scratch got infected and killed him. Nothing anyone could do.

Meanwhile several of his students got shot multiple times and lived. James Longstreet got shot in the fucking throat and lived. Richard Ewell lost a leg and then returned to duty and got shot again! James Ricketts got shot twice and had his horse fall on him.

Absolutely fucking wild.

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It's actually inspiring.

The fact that despite being so depressed, BrazenAutomaton just refuses to take shit from anyone is great, actually.

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I mean yes, because we're up-jumped pack-animal monkeys whose "reasoning" abilities ultimately come down to weird chemical interactions in our heads and whether the emotion nodes squirted out enough of the happy juice today to temporarily counteract the angery-slime oozing around because of our lack of ape mates and status.

honest to god can’t stop thinking about this song about jeff bezos by philip labes (link takes you to his spotify). it’s such a good example of politically driven folk music.