shared on Aug. 9ths

2019: Some people think For A Few Dollars More is better than A Fistful of Dollars, but I'm not one. It's more stylish, but the story is slight. I would call it a director's movie, and not as a compliment. How can anyone believe mass killers are sane and not be a misanthrope? 2018: The job of neoliberal Democrats is to make sure the lesser evil is no lesser than necessary. The hardest discussions may be between people who focus on rules and people who focus on exceptions. The identitarian left consists of two groups: 1. Neoliberals who use identitarianism to keep from thinking about class. 2. Utopian socialists who treat racism and sexism as personal failures rather than the consequences of an economically hierarchal society. 2017: Clinton fans still complain that Sanders was weak in the South—a region that Clinton lost. Rude online discussions end with comparisons to Hitler or Stalin; civil discussions end with digressions about the Oxford comma. Lurkers are the only sane people on the internet. 2014: Day 2. Again told everyone on internet how they're wrong. No one has thanked me yet. It must be the silence before the slow clap.

shared on Aug 7ths

2019: Class privilege doesn't mean your life hasn't been hard. It means that wealth isn't one of the things making it harder. How capitalists lie with facts: When they don't want something like MedicareForAll, they talk about what it'll cost instead of what it'll save. When they want something like a war, they talk about the need instead of who will profit. 2017: By identitarian logic, the only people who may criticize you are your identical twins and your clones. Mail addresses with "Or current resident" mean "support recycling." 2014: I just got blocked by someone I was agreeing with, but I was not agreeing strongly enough with him for his taste. Oh, humans, we are funny.

shared on Aug 6ths

2019: If you want a pretentious name for bullshit jobs, use Sisyphean jobs. Sisyphus was not condemned to an impossible job—he was condemned to an unending, meaningless one. I've long been frustrated by the way Americans use one word, class, to describe both social and economic class. I just learned that Max Weber used status for the first and class for the second. I should adopt that. Old labor joke: Kid: Why is our house cold? Dad: Because there's no coal. Kid: Why? Dad: I got fired. Kid: Why? Dad: Because there's too much coal. 2017: Socialist jokes are only funny if everyone gets them. Regarding Hiroshima and Nagasaki: I periodically wonder about the people who said, "We're winning this war, the Japanese have indicated they would be willing to surrender if the Emperor can continue to be Emperor, but we've got these two bombs we want to show off."

shared on Aug 5ths

2019: Just rewatched The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. It's not a perfect movie—I'd love to see someone like the Coen Bros remake it—but it is a great movie because it asks questions that don't have easy answers.

The First and Second Amendments are very different. The First has no context for the rights it covers. The Second does: "well-regulated militias".
That means we have the right to be vocal assholes, but we don't have the right to be assholes with a gun.

2018: I am always a bit amused when people who do not support free speech complain about being censored. But I still support them.

2017: How the two-party system works: if the right fist doesn't get you, the left one will.