A cautionary tale if you’re considering.

Years ago someone left my employer abruptly, and on their desk was left a fancy vertical mouse. It sat there for a few days, and I kept glancing over, at first ambivalent, but as time passed the temptation increased. I debated the dilemma of becoming a vertical mouse person, was that really for me? Eventually I succumbed and thought hey it’s worth a try, see what it’s like to be one of them… pure learning opportunity…

Then something happened… I got used to it in about a half hour and in the first day my precision improved. A sudden urge came over me to tell all my coworkers, was I really becoming one of those people so fast? Trying to resist was futile and within a couple days I became a vertical mouse person, always wanting to tell everyone how great they are, constantly resisting the urge. I forgot what life was like with a horizontal mouse, and I never looked back.

Grew up in similar fairly liberal environment and ended up running the Christian fellowship group at my college, was big in to New Monasticism and Shane Claiborne etc. Eventually left but it definitely had some radical elements that seem to be lacking now. There was always a toxic side to the church culture as well that never sat well with me, very cliquey and hetero. You could feel the politics seeping in a lot during the Bush years too, even more than in the 90s. Glad I left before I married in to it though, I could never be in a Christian marriage in the way my friends from those days are.

Yeah using Roman currency to purchase animals for sacrifice wasn’t allowed, it first needed to be exchanged for temple currency. The money changers charged fees on top of this, effectively using the temple as a business for themselves. So what was supposed to be a holy place was turned in to a place of bartering and commerce.

It lacked the wide age range appeal other Pixar movies manage to pull off. I didn’t like the fundamental elements as a metaphor for race/culture either, it’s sort of racist to imply people of different backgrounds are so fundamentally different like that, although it did serve as a strong visual for the story. It would have been more accurate if the characters were projecting fundamental differences on to the same element, like different phases of water or something. That was the only real thing I thought was actually wrong with it, otherwise it just lacked the magic that other Pixar movies have.

It’s funny cause crypto can totally be traced, like the whole idea is everyone has a copy of a history of the transactions, although wallets can be effectively anonymous with certain caveats. The idea of providing my address for a shipment was the part that always put me off with darknet. Although knowing how the laws work with how police obtain warrants etc, I didn’t see a huge risk on that front. Also the things I wanted to obtain weren’t necessarily illegal, mostly Shulgin’s compounds, spores, certain species of wood bark, and we already had a huge medical grey market cannabis market. Plain old etransfers were always preferred because under $10k its not a red flag and nothing “illegal” is happening anyway in the supply chain.

Heard a lot of this growing up like Seeger, Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, but also Canadians like Lightfoot and Stan Rogers. Lately I’ve enjoyed some of the IWWs compilations of workers’ songs, Utah Philips etc. Phil Ochs is up there too.

My mother’s from an assimilated Mennonite background and it was one of the non-Christian genres that was permissible to her parents, because of the pacifist and civil rights sentiments in a lot of that music at the time. Also it lacked the sex and drugs themes which rock had. “I Aint Marching Anymore” and “Where have all the flowers gone?” I remember hearing quite often.

Yea Wilhelm is practically an easter egg at this point for the true film buffffss. I don’t mind it but it’s definitely focus breaking in that way, and the MCU stuff wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t so overdone. Like when Firefly came out I didn’t mind that style of dialogue, all the characters are basically Joss Whedon but it’s his show and Buffy was sort of like that too… but now it’s like every character is a little Joss Whedon and it’s just too much Whedon.

Imagine if Wes Anderson’s idiosyncratic understated dialogue became a thing everyone did. I totally get why people don’t like his movies but I can appreciate what he’s doing for what it is. I would hate them if that style became common.

Sometimes with media studies it’s better not to know cause it can ruin your enjoyment and make you overly critical, I’ve just accepted to enjoy trash for what it is and not judge people for liking it cause everyone has some trash they enjoy. It’s fun to understand why trash is trash though and make fun of it in a non-elitist way.

But yeah the quick quippy self-referencing dialogue I really don’t enjoy and it’s what’s permeated a lot of stuff in recent years, I much preferred the over-the-top 90s style with a lot of physical stage acting to back it up. Characters just standing there trying to out-quip each other just isn’t enjoyable for me. A lot of the MCU characters are written as narcissists as well, that’s not necessarily bad cause there’s amazing narcissist characters, but it’s not really in line with their roles in the stories. This might be going a bit too far but there’s also some fascist themes in the MCU, but that critique has to get in to a lot more than just MCU. Toure Reed has some interesting writing on that.

Dialogue in MCU movies has heavy use of quips and self-referencing. Joss Whedon is credited with popularizing this style and it’s been common in a lot of media from 2000s-2010s. The trend is shifting now so the style is more recognizable as something belonging to that era. It’s like how with older media you can place it’s decade even if you don’t know exactly how.

It’s an insincere way of writing but not everyone cares or perceives it that way, and having sincerity isn’t even necessary all the time. Part of the issue with self-referencing is it takes for granted that the audience understands they are watching a movie and uses that as a point of irony. Like there will be a pretty “serious” scene with maybe an impassioned speech or realizing what has to be done to stop the bad guy, and then a character will be like “well I guess it’s time to do the action scene now” or something to that effect. It’s like the characters are saying “you’re watching an MCU movie, here’s what happens in these types of movies.” A sex scene would be like “so… were all alone now… I guess this is when we’re supposed to engage in sexual intercourse.” With quips they might be funny but people don’t actually talk like that and it can be a crutch for humor, so when overused some people notice it more than others and it’s not something that everyone will think is funny.

One simple dispute I know that doesn’t question the violence is where the violence took place. Western journalists stationed in the square reported hearing sporadic gunfire, the majority of the violence that happened took place in western Beijing and side streets. The pictures with dead that are shared aren’t located in the square, however that is the way its portrayed in Western media. One can accept this inaccuracy while not being a denier.

Totally agree, I used to mod on a couple of the default subs and it made me hate reddit and view the open forum aspect of social media differently. I think I fully realized this when Glenn Greenwald did an AMA and said a mod team I was on (worldnews) was all paid Obama shills, because the sub had a rule against opinion columns which is what a lot of his content at the time was. So I got a bunch of hate mail about that, and sometimes journalists would even contact us individually for whatever reason, which I mostly ignored but occasionally would lead them on them ghost them. I had to make new accounts to deal with wanting to use the site just for the smaller niche interest subreddits.

Another thing I saw is how the most quickly digestible garbage content has such an advantage on the larger subs, and how the hivemind manipulates itself, by selecting out of a huge pool the very few posts that get to be on the front page. I blame this sort of echo chamber for some of what’s happening with politics now, or at least accelerating what was already happening.

And so is the corporate music machine that markets this excuse for a protest song, it’s just another culture war debate masquerading as politics.

Their “color blindness” and concern trolling falls away behind closed doors. It’s empty platitudes and surface level enlightened centrist garbage and nothing more.

Color blindness itself is basically a way to decouple yourself from the political economy you are a subject of, which is in no way “color blind” and has more or less created these system of classification. I don’t even subscribe to DiAngelo’s individualist notions of “white fragility,” I think they can even serve to reify the notion of race, but people saying they’re color blind is such a dismissal to address the world around you.

Exactly what I thought, the first verse and most of the chorus is legit working class anxiety. The rest is blaming other victims of the system, and while it references “rich men,” it contains no criticism of their wealth, the reference to taxes is more the opposite.

These lyrics reflect completely legitimate working class anxieties but supports the system that perpetuates them. “Taxed to no end,” the corporate tax rate has been brought down by lobbying for decades. The obese focus is on one hand legit since eating like shit is cheap, but it has blinders on about why that is, since it’s not convenient to their point.

These parts are all completely legit, although the lyrics are pretty bad. The same things have been said by much better voices in much better ways.

I’ve been sellin’ my soul, workin’ all day

Overtime hours for bullshit pay

So I can sit out here and waste my life away

Drag back home and drown my troubles away

Young men are puttin’ themselves six feet in the ground

‘Cause all this damn country does is keep on kickin’ them down

Overall it’s a great example of politics in America right now and how the working class is exploited by the right wing, as well as how liberal media, in the mainstream “dialogue,” fails to address the working class anxieties and instead focuses on the “controversy” of the song. The coverage isn’t really about the lyrics, it’s about the way people are interpreting them politically, and it all favors and perpetuates the exact same system.

Exactly markets aren’t the distinction, communist and socialist democracies all have markets. A really interesting model of that was Allende’s Project Cybersyn in Chile before the US sponsored fascist coup that put Pinochet in charge. There’s highly regulated markets within capitalist countries as well, bulk energy is largely very “designed” and regulated markets.

The Marxian view of socialism would consider it as a transition state between capitalism and communism. While someone may be ideologically communist, they will likely have more political opportunities catering to socialist policies in capitalist democracies with a “left” party. Revolutionaries don’t believe this is possible, and argue capitalism’s structure won’t be threatened by socialist policies unless a revolution occurs, and might even consider comrades who support socialist parties as “not real” communists. Germany’s socialist party supporting ww1 is often used in forms of this argument.

Ultimately in a lot of these capitalist democracies, there are individual leftists but no real political power, this is certainly the case in the US. Working to raise class-consciousness and labor organizing is basically the front of whatever left exists there. It’s a bleak time to be on the left, and sometimes I wish I could have the enthusiasm of the self-righteous liberals who naively think that if everyone regardless of identity was distributed equally in the capitalist system everything would be right and fair.

Control measures are inevitable, like account length requirements, etc. I don’t see any way around that to have a usable usergenerated site. A lot of the previous reddit alternatives were full of racism because of who reddit pissed off on the site, but people like that need an audience and they don’t generate good content. The nerds who do always have to deal with trolls.

It’s nice to see the latest upswing in labor actions in the US, but the labor movement isn’t what it used to be that’s for sure. Even the way the history of labor is taught now is completely whitewashed and decoupled from any notion of class conflict. Take the history of civil right’s organizers for instance and the connection with labor, MLK is the big one but also Randolph, the famous “I Have A Dream” speech at the March on Washington (“-for Jobs and Labor” is usually left out of the title nowadays.) Also the Jim Crow order is purely seen as a racist order, which is accurate, but the means by which it was designed to deal with the Populists in the late 19th century because of the threat they were as a political force. It’s even in the culture war shit that goes on now, Bud Light for instance, none of that “conversation” ever touched on the fact they were basically forced to first hire queer people because of Teamsters labor pressure and gay bar boycotting their beer.

I think the militant conflicts like Harlan country are pretty well known but again it’s like the class notions are removed in today’s recollections and how it’s taught. It’s focused on some individuals who wanted better wages vs the bad guy running the mine, not about the inherent conflicts between these workers and the owners by design of the economic system, and how that still pervades today. It’s seen as something from the past.

I’m unionized in Canada as well as a power sector worker, although I work in IT. The contract negotiations are very compensation-focused not necessarily focused on enhancing what is already law.

One of my current projects, the PM for the US company went off for maternity leave, and I was surprised she was back like a few weeks later. It’s basically a year standard here, and 18 months isn’t completely unusual depending on employer benefits for top-up on your salary.