As a late night cab driver, if you're ever wondering why I'm on the street rather than the driveway in your sketchy, pickup truck filled suburban neighborhood, this is why.

Give me a shady looking industrial district or run down residential neighborhood over semi-rural suburbia any day of the week. I feel much safer.

I love reading, but the moment an author tries to guilt me into reading their particular viewpoint as though I'm just a slave of the system if I don't, I check out. I have better things to do, and this person doesn't have any right to my time.

That's a weird spelling of "hate-crime".

Not really. A bulletproof vest won't protect your head. Meanwhile they're standing directly on the other side of a door that they're shooting through, while the home owner could have been anywhere on the other side of the door. They're playing a guessing game, but the homeowner can just shoot the door at head-height and their bulletproof vests will mean nothing.

Oh no! Not our capitalism! Where will we get all our poverty?!?!

Oh no, not a better job market, more available housing, and less pollution! What a catastrophy!

Flippancy aside, of course birth rates are declining. Of course constant expansion isn't sustainable. The systemic gluttony of capitalism literally cannot go on forever, and the faster we slow it down the better. It's a cancer on our species and our planet. If we want to continue to exist in any capacity we need to get it under control, and that's going to require reconsidering things like constant market growth and never letting the population fall.

Watch this lead to inventive new ways to store energy.

Everyone who supports authoritarianism thinks they're going to be the exception. They can see other people who their politics denigrates as outsiders easily, but they could never be outsiders because they're them and they buy into the bullying. They think signalling that they're on board with mistreating other people will protect them from being mistreated, but all it does in reality is create a society where no one is safe.

Even the powerful people who buy into this thinking will find that it bites them in the ass eventually. They may be late on the list, but they're still on the list. Eventually either the ever-shrinking circle of "insiders" will exclude them, or they'll be in the last in-group once they've alienated the rest of society and put their own safety at risk. Every dictator is terrified of this, because they've seen how it plays out. They're just gambling that it won't happen to them, but eventually the mob will come. The best they can hope for is to delay it as long as possible.

But queer Republicans? Republicans of color? Disabled Republicans? Republican women even? They're on the chopping block from the start and are only surrounding themselves with the people who want to diminish them while alienating anyone who might genuinely want to help.

All the more reason they can't look directly at it. They think if they don't make eye contact or try to fight back or run, the predator won't come for them. They couldn't be more wrong.

I definitely didn't get my understanding of socioeconomics from Mao or militaristic dictators in general. Marx? Sure. Engels? Sure. Lenin? I mean, as an example of how to use workers' rights as a veil for the promotion of authoritarianism I guess. Reading the State and Revolution is an exercise in seeing how someone can take a good idea and use it to justify terrible shit.

Personally, I take a view of Marx and Engels as descriptivists. Reading works like the Communist Manifesto and Das Kapital, my takeaway is that these are describing a natural process whereby hoarding of wealth and influence inevitably leads to an overthrowing of power in a cycle that culminates in capitalism and the eventual seizing of the means of production in response by workers. When I read Lenin I see an accelerationist who wants to jump start this process and doesn't care how many people suffer and die in the interem.

To me, that's a form of interference that slows progress in the long run. If you start burning rocket fuel as soon as possible before acquiring enough to reach escape velocity, all you do is cause your rocket to crash back down to Earth if it gets moving at all. Do it hard enough or enough times without a controlled landing, hitting cities full of people with the wreckage, and you're just going to make people skeptical of rocketry.

That's not to say no one should do anything to bolster workers' rights, we absolutely should. It's a natural part of the process for people to be informed by theory and try to advance things. But that's far different from purging large portions of the population in order to shift the system in the span of a single generation before there's widespread support. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat is, to me, about the most anti-proletarian measure you can take. It slows things down and harms a lot of people with poor results. For evidence, literally look at Russia today. Look at the reputation communism has in Eastern Europe. Lenin and Stalin forestalled any possibility of a worker's uprising by at least a couple of generations. The same can be said of Mao.

And the reactions this post is going to get? I'm guessing many will be much more in line with the knee-jerk thoughtless mockery of South Park and Rick Sanchez than the considered and careful words of Marx and Engels. That also functions as a sort of steam valve letting off the required pressure to achieve meaningful results in favor of mindless posturing, which is why I often question its motivation. It serves the bourgeoisie, not the people.

You're on a roll this week!

I don't know how it works in the UK, but if possible I'd look into getting a protection order against harassment. Definitely gather whatever evidence you can (a security camera might be a good investment), but with someone like this they may very well tell on themselves if it goes to court. A reasonable person wouldn't be doing something like this in the first place, so they may well make it readily apparent that this is the sort of thing they think is acceptable in a court room. Especially if they've admitted to you to doing it on purpose.

If you're able to request police body camera footage, it might be worth it to do that after calling in a noise complaint, and if you share a hallway you might be able to record the interaction yourself if not. If you rent and do share a hallway, consider asking your landlord to install a camera in a shared space so that you can get footage that way. Make sure to check the laws in your area regarding consent for recording. If you're allowed to record secretly, maybe you can get them to admit it again on camera.

I had a similar situation to this with a transphobic neighbor who was doing this for about 6 months. A court date got it squared away, because she told on herself to the police while on our hallway camera. It might help in your situation too.

I've lived on the sidewalk and dealt with the dehumanization involved in that. It's certainly ugly. But I've also seen people who are legitimately terrifying for good reason. Like, randomly pulling a knife in a Starbucks while arguing with someone who isn't there terrifying. Both of those situations require empathy, but the latter maybe also requires someone with a taser in case guy decides to get stabby. Personally, I'd rather that someone not be a cop, but the options are kind of slim in that department.

It's not all one or the other.

Pointing fingers at one another in outrage on the internet probably won't be the thing that helps though. Go buy somebody lunch.

Are you really fully unaware of incels, the manosphere, and the alt-right pipeline? This shit is all over social media.

There's a strong encouragement for men to fall into this "redpill" philosophy that casts everyone who doesn't look like them, especially anyone who ends up on the less-privileged end of any measure of intersectional privilege, as an aggressor attempting to steal their place in society and "replace" them.

Have you heard anyone complaining about how you can't make jokes anymore or can't compliment women anymore? They're echoing a hallucination of white male oppression by queer feminist socialists. In response they elected Trump and spend their days rumbling around in their massive coal-rolling pickup trucks that have never seen a speck of dirt or a heavier load than a few groceries or maybe a couch.

Two of these stats are in my TTRPG (gumption and moxie).

It also features things like pep, knacks, savvy, and nerve.

Carlin had some good material, but this is an absolutely stupid mindset. We can cause an extreme level of ecological damage. Will the planet eventually recover? Quite possibly. But that's not a certainty, and in the mean time we're triggering a mass extinction precisely because irresponsible humans figure there's no way we can hurt the Earth and it's self-important hubris to think that we can.

But the time we're living through and the time we're heading into are all the proof we should need that it's actually hubris to assume our actions have no meaningful impact.

Hey, I'm in this post!

If I remember correctly, I got banned for accusing ValueSubtracted of being essentially an advertiser. He's constantly flooding the feed with patch notes for STO and advertisements for merch. I assume he's being paid for this.

I did also tell him that his name describes what he's doing to the website.

The funny thing is, I saw this and was going to post here anyway, but didn't actually remember if I got banned or not. Well.. I guess I did! Nothing of value was lost.

Oh, I didn't see the screenshots somehow!Apparently you can see all this for yourself! :D

What exactly is the point of a Jellyfin server? Wouldn't it be easier to just like, open the files? Why would that require a server?

Ugh there's so much of this obnoxious shit on YouTube. "Person A DEMOLISHES Trump in front of Setting B!" And then the video is literally just someone saying the same shit everyone is saying and Trump isn't even there. Or like "Watch Republican mortified as they realize they screwed themselves by electing Trump" and there's literally zero self reflection or regret.

There are so many videos and headlines that are literally just feeding on the clickbait potential of people waiting for a substantial response to this complete mess. Hypothetical dunking on people who aren't even in the room or don't react at all isn't the victory people seem to like to advertise it as.

And then they like fully miss an actual town hall in a Republican district booing the shit out of some MAGA toolbox.

What the hell dystopian meow meow beanz nonsense is this?