happybadger [he/him]

A cargo ebike. No insurance (very cheap anti-theft insurance if you want), no registration fees, $20/year in electricity. I can get anywhere in the city as fast as driving but that’s no longer stressful. Instead of being stuck in traffic and dealing with road raging drivers, I get to zoom along nature paths with the strength of an Olympic athlete. My commute feels liberating instead of like the first and final insult of my day. It’s the first thing I’ve purchased since a smartphone that feels like it’s a foundational 21st century technology. Most of my problems with 20th century development go out the window with it.

What really fucks things up is that I’m next to some of the most fertile agricultural land on the planet. You can dig 3m down and still have beautiful black topsoil that grows anything you throw in it. These grasslands used to be 2m tall and so thick that missionary convoys looked back and couldn’t see the footprints of their hundreds of members. All of that land is used to grow corn and soybeans for cattle. The people driving four hours from food deserts to pick through the scraps of our grocers are doing so from land I would kill to farm on. I could provide those entire communities with countless healthy calories if I could afford the land that currently feeds cows whose beef I can no longer afford.

The Grapes of Wrath should be required yearly reading for adults. The only difference between its 1930s setting and now is that everything is Oklahoma. I can’t flee to anywhere better than the place I can’t afford to live in anymore.

I can drive about 200km for the cost of a combo meal at a fast food restaurant. My average weekly grocery bill for one person is maybe $100, up 50% from five years ago, while my hourly wage is $17.50 and nobody is hiring. Especially in the American West where things are as spread out as like the Mongolian steppes, it’s wild how driving 80km+ is a normal commute from towns where you can’t buy healthy food.

The local foodbanks are so overwhelmed that they restrict access to people who live in the city or county. Our surrounding counties are poorer agricultural ones, some in red states without our state-level welfare funding to offset the loss of federal funding, and their residents will drive hours to use our food banks. We’re really defining the hinterlands with this crash.

Give yourself time and space to distance yourself emotionally from it. Delve into something that lets you reestablish your identity and do independent personal growth, then use that regained confidence to find the kind of relationship you want. I just hike exhaustively until I no longer think about them or care what they’re doing, becoming more of a naturalist which helps my self-worth. In that community I can find people with similar politics who make better partners. If you try to rush your recovery from that relationship or turn to self-destruction instead of growth, you just further entrap yourself in the patterns that resulted in the last one.

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Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.

Step 1: everyone be nice to each other

Step 2: please bro

I just have a sense of morbid curiosity about 2028. How little will democrats have learned from the past decade? How can they possibly fail in a more embarrassing way than 2024 or install a more embarrassing person than 2020?

This is liberalism’s moment to really eat ass+hair.

If they have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t be afraid.

Favourite: civic infrastructure. I turn a lever and safe water comes out. If my entire city uses the bathroom at the same time, nobody gets cholera. I’ll be warm this winter. I can bike on a flat path to a lake owned by the public, then charge my phone for it at free and browse hexbear instead of looking at that lake. When infrastructure works and meets our core needs it’s a miracle of collectivism.

Least favourite: Atomisation and the idea of isolated “first/second/third place”. There’s no reason a park can’t be as educational as a university class or as enriching as a wilderness or as productive as a homestead, other than we choose to develop it for one limited set of recreation use. Downtown cores don’t need to be hyper-commercial, hostile spaces that are unsafe to walk around but we develop them for the benefit of capital instead of pedestrians. The ideal garden city is intensely focused on critical geography and situating people in a larger socioecological project. The lines should be blurred between grey and green space, between commercial/residential/social, and between human/natural enrichment as much as possible. It’s all the worse when you bring in the separation of town and country with those rural communities alienated from civic infrastructure and cultural participation and the urban communities alienated from touching something other than grass.

At what point did the current politics leanings of the Democratic party would make up your spiritual and moral framework?

When Obama won in 2008 and didn’t end the wars or close Guantanamo Bay or provide recession relief, I knew I wasn’t a liberal and that the democrats represented a .

Before that I read the Communist Manifesto at like age 12. Its worldview made more sense than the social studies textbooks I was otherwise reading and when I found the Theses on Feuerbach it gave me a foundation for secular morality/ethics that clicked with the Sartre and Camus I was starting to read.

I don’t know what you are, but my is beeping.

I try to maintain good work relationships with managers because I want things to go easy for me. My time off requests, my ability to be promoted or transfer, the daily workload and its division, my ability to advocate for what I think is best- all of these are at the discretion of the manager regardless of my beliefs. When there’s no target on my back and I’m seen as a team player, the job is predictable and not unnecessarily difficult.

For that reason I’d apologise and explain the situation. Work smarter, not harder. You’re making your job more difficult if she dislikes you and your coworkers like her.

Step right into the room for gifted children such as yourself.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/brecht/works/1935/questions.htm

Who built Thebes of the 7 gates ? In the books you will read the names of kings. Did the kings haul up the lumps of rock ?

And Babylon, many times demolished, Who raised it up so many times ?

In what houses of gold glittering Lima did its builders live ? Where, the evening that the Great Wall of China was finished, did the masons go?

Great Rome is full of triumphal arches. Who erected them ?

Over whom did the Caesars triumph ? Had Byzantium, much praised in song, only palaces for its inhabitants ?

Even in fabled Atlantis, the night that the ocean engulfed it, The drowning still cried out for their slaves.

The young Alexander conquered India. Was he alone ?

Caesar defeated the Gauls. Did he not even have a cook with him ?

Philip of Spain wept when his armada went down. Was he the only one to weep ?

Frederick the 2nd won the 7 Years War. Who else won it ?

Every page a victory. Who cooked the feast for the victors ?

Every 10 years a great man. Who paid the bill ?

So many reports.

So many questions.

That somehow manages to be sadder than at least 5% of the things her base does. Maybe even 6% but that would displace getting the hexcode of her campaign colour tattooed on their wrists like holocaust victims.

Plenty of good solid people have a business and pump the money back into their employees and community.

Small businesses have a higher rate of wage theft than large ones. For the vast majority, the employees they aren’t stealing from in a legal sense are still trapped in wage slavery. They pump money back into the chamber of commerce, local republican party, police department, and anti-human development efforts because those things protect their business. The only thing separating them from Jeff Bezos is the degree to which they succeed at the same thing.

If this guy is enough to trick you, cool. Peek-a-boo is going to blow your fucking mind when you see that one.

The bandwagon use of oligarchy stood out to me before anything else too. That’s nothing more than a judas goat term being used by social fascists to make baby leftists vote blue no matter who. It belongs on those “In this house we believe…” signs that liberals immediately removed from their lawns after Trump won.

He has big 2018 John Fetterman energy for me, but like if Fetterman had a job prior to holding office. I don’t trust anyone who proudly boasts about being a combat veteran in a war other than WW2.