This was me, last week lol. Already had the card, but criminally underused it. I love philosophy, but haven’t read most of the actual works, so I picked up some Camus and Kafka. Just finished The Fall, and I’m so glad to have done so.

I also signed up for Libby, thinking audiobooks on hikes would be dope, but so far my mind wanders too much to absorb the words, so that’s been challenging.

We’re like pandas in captivity. We’ll fuck if the conditions are right. They haven’t been right in a loooooong time. A little bit of enrichment in our enclosures would help tremendously.

You’re listing specific examples that literally no one has a problem with. Yes, if you’re moving large equipment you need a large tool to do so. The general public doesn’t do this, like… Ever. The dude in the photo has almost certainly never towed anything with it. These kinds of vehicles serve a purpose, but the vast majority of them are sold to people who will NEVER use it for that purpose, who just take up excess room in lots and on the streets, rolling around with visibility that makes a fucking TANK look like it’s got a clear line of sight.

There’s a whole host of political and cultural reasons that these vehicles are as popular as they are. Almost none of it is actual, practical requirement. No one cares about the worker using the tool to do a job, we’re pissed at the pavement princesses who drive around like they own the place without doing an honest day’s work in their lives. Hope that cleared some of the confusion up.

Everything is politics. The only way to avoid politics is to completely remove yourself from society. Sorry it hurts your feelings to see, but that’s the reality of it, so get over it.

I’m not invested in this conversation from 2 years ago, but I’ll simply reject the premise that landlords have to make a profit. That’s a big maybe at best.

You can already pretend to be a kid in a room with other kids on discord! There’s a HUGE CSAM problem on it.

Meh, probably. It’s fun though.

No. Politics isn’t just about voting. It’s everything Every action. Every shitty post on the Internet. Everything you buy - you’re voting with your dollars. Your attention. Your time.

No, you individually probably don’t contribute that much to the direct decisions, but your voice reaches others, helps mold their opinions, change how they see and interact with the world. Then they go and do the same thing. That’s all politics.

Something like the climate is a centuries long process to change. Your vote moved the needle one way or the other, absolutely. But something like the climate takes generations, multiple administrations, choices, processes…

So like… You didn’t vote for it to be cold, no. You voted for a person who had a set of policies that will impact the world, moving things in a certain direction. And further, the fact that the world is as it is now is the result of all of those previous votes throughout history. You live IN politics. You are not exempt from it, your world is literally molded by it.

I’m not reading you. Nothing is implied by anything. You live in a political world. It is shaped by the politics going on around you. Your simple existence shapes the politics of the world. You cannot be apolitical. You can only be ignorant of the myriad ways politics influences your life, your abilities, the obstacles you fact, the choices you have… Everything.

I’m not saying you have to pick a specific side, or that anything you do means you’re going to vote one way or the other. That’s insane. Its a bit like Rush. You ever listen to them? If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. You can choose not to engage with politics actively, but you’re still engaging with it by just existing. May as well do so with an informed opinion.

It’s not about sides, in this context. It’s just -political-. Whether you vote conservative, progressive, anything in between, you, me, and the whole rest of the world has to deal with that decision.

If you buy the current science on global warming, literally yes. The politics of generations ago still affect us to this day, including such things as the fossil fuel industry’s massive prevalence.

Even at home. The luxury of indoor plumbing and utilities in general are pretty firmly political.

Pooping itself, no. Probably not political. But getting to the point where you have indoor plumbing, provided by a utility company you probably pay significantly less than the actual cost of said utility? Yeah, that’s the direct result of politics.

It means that the impacts of the politics on you change each day. It means you are in a place where the politics have allowed you to have these myriad options.

Literally an impossible position. Every facet of your day to day life is the result of politics. They may be ignorant of politics. They may hate politics. But they were born into a political world, and so they are a part of politics.

Well I’d call it grotesque, but it’s clearly moving water.

Ain’t no body on a high horse around here. I’m acknowledging that it’s going to be a struggle. I’m also acknowledging that eventually the struggle will become a necessity, unless you’re one of the few tenths of a percent of the population that’s actually benefitting from this madness. Things are going to get worse regardless of if we struggle and fight or not, I’m just hoping for a “better” on the other side of that worse, and it won’t happen until we’re all in on the struggle.

And that’s where the different kinds of protests come in. The single mother of 3 just trying to keep their kids fed? Sure they probably need to keep doing whatever they can to keep fresh food coming. But in the meantime, build a community. Know your neighbors. We are in this together. We fight together, we survive together, we die together. That single mother’s of 3’s struggles are not exclusively their own, they need the support of the people around them who can help. This shit is beyond individual family units and individual struggles at this point.

No one is equipped to do this alone. I don’t mean overthrow the current status quo, I mean live. We’re not designed to try to make all of our ends meet, especially not with the quality of life we’ve come to expect. We’ve gone from trusting our local community to supply and provide for us, people we know and are invested in ourselves, to putting all of that on the government and our employer, both of whom have no real motivation to help you any further than you are useful to them.

So what can a single mother of 3 do in lieu of a general strike? Build something. Build community. Build a garden. Provide shelter for those in your community who may need it. Find people you want to help because they want to help you. They’re out there, outside of the internal issues. It’s work, yes. It’ll make the day to day a bit harder but… It’s getting harder anyway.

General strike and protest cover different things, both effective means of displaying our outrage. A general strike is a form of protest.

As far as ‘materializing out of nothing’ I don’t expect that either. This is far from out of nothing, though. These sentiments have been boiling over since 2016, literally a decade. We need more voices saying “let’s do it now” and fewer saying “but I have other responsibilities”. It’s rapidly approaching the point where every possible responsibility one could have runs through this issue.

More and more our responsibilities are shifting from the personal towards a responsibility to the whole. Resistance in any form is going to mean hardship, hardship I’d much rather deal with than the country we’re heading towards. It will NEVER be easy. It will NEVER be a good time.