Him in a vacuum? Yes, probably.However, it's the handlers and enablers Wormtonguing him behind the scenes that make it difficult.
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As with another well-known French hard liquor, drink enough and you, too, just might taste colors swirling on your tongue and hear emotions swirling in the sky.
Absinthe does not actually cause hallucinations
Oh no, please no...We're not going to make it, are we?
I had the same experience on a trip to Europe. All of the European customs officials were happy, kind, and welcoming, all while still doing their job. When I came back to the states, the customs official was dressed in all black, sidearm clearly visible, and he was mean-mugging and being condescending the entire time. When he asked if I had bought anything while I was overseas, I said yes, and he just stared at me. For 10 to 15 seconds at least. I wasn't sure if he was waiting for me to say something, produce receipts, stop resisting? Eventually he huffed loudly and angrily asked if I had spent more than $10k; no, I did not.
He stamped the things he needed stamp hard enough to shake his little kiosk and gruffly growled for me to move on. If a citizen gets treated like that, I don't want to know what a non-citizen has to go through.
The biggest fault of Game theory is that it is biased towards instant utility and short-term rewards. It does not model for scenarios where reduced short-term rewards can lead to greater gains in the long-term.
In short, decisions made for singular benefit typically have worse long-term results than decisions accounting for collective benefit.
"Human nature" is where material conditions intersects with cultural conditioning. "Left leaning" doesn't mean anything in America, especially when the cultural underpinning of the society is consumerism and the acquisition of wealth.
Ownership class needs to extract as much value as they can out of their workers. They think that if you don't entangle healthcare with employment, then no one's going to work anymore. I think it is all projection; the wealthy already don't work nearly as hard as the people they exploit.
That's great advice. I used to hate tomatoes when I was younger, but as an adult I found that I actually love fresh garden tomatoes. Store-bought tomatoes had a flavor that younger me could only describe as "sharply dirt-like." The tomatoes I pluck from my own plants are sweet and delicious, and the heirloom varieties sold in farmer's markets are usually tasty, too.
I have to try this. I'm going to make playlist of sea shanties, Alestorm, and Captain Dan & the Scurvy Crew and move it to the top of my "get stuff done" folder.
Agreed. Season three TNG is peak Star Trek. That said, and at the risk of being flayed by the Star Trek community at large, I think DS9 was the best series, taken as a whole.
Yep! Not only is incredibly economical, it's a healthier meal than most "traditional" American breakfasts.
Didn't stop conservative media from deriding it as millennial over-indulgence. Vilifying the millennial tendency of frugality + preference for plants-based diet choices by portraying avocado toast as excessive and soy milk as emasculating, along with a concerted effort to deliver narrative to the /pol/ audience, it not only swayed the opinions of older generations, but spurred parts of the younger generations to resent each other. I'm sure meat industry profits were also in the mix somewhere.
The only winners in the culture war are the ones who drive the narratives, and it's been that way in the US since radio was invented.
You are right that worker unions should have the weight of collective bargaining behind them, enough to affect the big changes. However, the US has demonstrated again and again that it will just crush unions if they start to irritate the ownership class a little too much. Like what Reagan did to air traffic controllers, what Scott Walker did to the Wisconsin public employees union, and the 2022 railway worker labor dispute under Biden.
Unions have been defanged by decades of ownership class lobbying and regulatory capture. The executive branch has no qualms about neutralizing and marginalizing union workers who step too far out of line. Something much bigger than labor unions is needed, but I'm afraid the ownership class has us all so exhausted from overwork and the media too wary of our neighbors for that to happen. For the public to build the kind of movement it needs will take both a hugely impactful economic downturn that affects everyone, and as much as I wish it weren't the case, an immensely charismatic figure to pull them together. Whenever someone with an anti-status quo message and the charisma to start pulling people together starts to gain traction, they invariably end up on the business end of the CIA.
It's hard not to feel defeated and deflated, especially when we're all so exhausted.
If only it could be so easy.
Ostensibly, the only significant difference between a megachurch pastor and the end-times-sign-holding street corner crier is audience approval.
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I have always hated warm coins, but I didn't realize it until now. Your comment gave me a plain toast-flavored eureka moment; thank you.
Agreed. The amount of down votes you're receiving shows that, even on lemmy, >25% of users have an immediate and ingrained distaste to others sharing the thought that religion can be dangerous. The religious hold their own religion in such high regards, not realizing that, for the most part, they were never given a choice of which religion, let alone the choice to not be religious at all.
"With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion" - Steven Weinberg
"Born in the USA" by Bruce Springsteen is widely regarded as a patriotic anthem. It's played at so many sporting events and political rallies that most people think it celebrates American pride. But the song itself is about a small-town kid who gets drafted, sent to war, and then comes home to find himself unemployed, homeless, and abandoned by the system that sent him there.
The irony is that media and propagandists grabbed the punchy chorus and stripped it from the rest of the song. An anti-establishment story about neglect and disillusionment that got balefully repurposed as an advertising jingle to drive military recruitment.
I hope that I am wrong about this, but I am not optimistic about Talarico.
He said all the right things to position himself as not just a progressive candidate, but as a christian candidate. White, male, middle aged, handsome, well spoken, seemingly levelheaded, and gives off strong Mr. Rogers vibes. Those things make him comparatively more palatable than most other democratic candidates, especially in Texas.
However, the democrats have had more than a handful of bad actors and turncoats in recent years. Candidates that talk the blue talk and walk the blue walk, but once they take office they quickly turn face. Sinema, Fetterman, Gillibrand, Robin Webb; not an exhaustive list of democrats that turned their backs to the rhetoric and policies that got them elected, but their the ones that spring to my mind first. Schumer, Jeffries, Pelosi, and a host of others could be rightly accused of actively aiding the republican-led undermining of the rule of law (and civil rights) while in office.
The Streisand effect has a long history of backfiring on public officials, so much so that it's not too far of a stretch to wonder if the administration banked on the FCC debacle to elevate Talarico. To be clear, I'm not entirely pessimistic about Talarico; I want to believe that there are still good people who want to get into public service for the right reasons. I'm just not optimistic because he's almost too good. Running a sleeper candidate against one of the stronger progressive voices in congress (who frequently and loudly called out the GOP's bullshit) is exactly the kind of thing that the far-right think tanks would do.
Some American grocery stores already tested the waters by posting armed guards in its stores. This article is a few years old, but the precedent stands.https://retailwire.com/discussion/hy-vee-creates-its-own-armed-security-squad-to-deter-crime/
Hy-Vee last week announced the introduction of an in-house armed security team to manage theft and in-store disturbances.
The Midwest grocery chain said in a statement that it has long worked with third-party contractors or off-duty law enforcement that work in a security capacity. The goal of bringing it in-house is “to create a consistent look for the security team and consistent approach to customer service and security across all [its] stores.”
I can't speak for OP, but in my case I could tell how "bad" a day was likely to be based on small clues that most people wouldn't see. Tiny things like a slight increase in the pitch of a parent's sigh, how quickly keys were put down as they came through the door, the position of their shoulders as they picked up a dinner fork. How the almost invisible deepening of the creases around their mouth and eyes matched the increasing tension in the air. Instantly knowing by the timbre of the footfalls climbing the stairs if I needed to pretend to be asleep.
Growing up in an abusive, trauma-inducing household fosters a talent to sense the proverbial "blood in the water," and how likely it is to send the sharks into a frenzy.
Goes fishing.Comes home with a chicken and no fish.