Kwakigra @ Kwakigra @beehaw.org

Posts

32

Comments

537

Joined

2 yr. ago

This quote is explicitly advising landlords to break the law which requires landlords to accept section 8 vouchers and rental assistance. I'm not sure how this is sensationalized.

Yes

Are you unaware of the leap of logic you're making here or is this an attempt at trolling? If it's the latter, 6/10. If it's the former. I'm sorry.

This is wishful thinking. People are not paid according to their productivity, although it is a minor factor. People are paid accordingly for a variety of factors including region, negotiating ability, charisma, job demand (the more a job is objectively helpful the less it is paid because people are willing to do it for its own merits), and network if they are commoners. If they are born into the ruling class or have amassed enough wealth to live through arbitrage, there is no requirement to produce anything other than the idea that you are productive.

The owner doesn't pay proportionally to their worker's ability to produce, they pay according to how little they can get away with since in order to profit it is necessary to minimize expenses. If two employees are important but the less productive employee refuses to work for less than a certain amount and the more productive employee is satisfied with what they're being paid, the less productive employee will be paid more.

Not true. If I have a group of people and they believe I'm extremely wealthy I don't have to do anything but promise to share my wealth with them according to how much I value them, making them compete with each other for my affection. This counts as work and it takes skill but I wouldn't say that doing this is useful.

What you described is a prejudice which is not great. This prejudice, like all prejudices, can be mitigated through exposure. Because of the stigmitization which you described this exposure has additional barriers than just population size. You're right that this is enough of a problem.

What I'm talking about is weaponizing this prejudice through politics. There has been a major push to pin "the fall of western society" on "trans ideology." Idiots may repeat these moronic talking points to one another, but they are not the ones who wrote those talking points for them to parrot mindlessly. In fact, these talking points are derived from a movement which has existed for just over a century.

One of the reasons fascism is so attractive to many people is that it unites the "proper" people against the enemy which is simulaneously corrupt and foolish but also masterminds who will undermine and destroy the culture unless they are stopped. Because these foes exist, the state must exercise greater social control and violence to manage the "menace." Because this population is small and stigmatized (by coincidence, relatively about the size of the Jewish population in 30's germany), the state can establish the apparatuses for social control and violence. Because these mechanisms are ostensibly to use against just trans people, idiotic bigots support them and a far greater number of people simply don't care. The thing is though, that from a fascist politician's point of view the excuse for creating these authoritarian devices is not important really. The point is to establish an authoritarian fascist government. Any defenseless group can be demonized and persecucted, they just have to pick a group that the population will let them persecute. As long as the greater population doesn't mind what they do to the scapegoat they can build up a system which can eventually be deployed against any threat to fascist power.

Trans should be mundane because it really is but unfortunately since they are such a small part of the total population by the nature of being trans they are an extremely convenient scapegoat. As long at they're on the chopping block like they are in Texas and Florida, there is a chopping block, and that's everyone's business. Only the delusional believe that it could never be their turn if these kinds of politics proliferate or become mainstream.

Eric Adams continues to the be shining example of how ranked choice voting is not a magic bullet to resolve the massive issues in American voting systems. I do consider it an improvement, but the degree to which it is an improvement seems to be grossly exaggerated. The culture itself needs to shift before American voters are prepared to break the dominance of the two parties.

Of course. By suggesting that I don't think this will do anything about corruption and will if anything be a tool used for corrupt purposes, I don't mean to suggest that there is nothing to do about corruption. Even though I think the solutions to social and economic problems are rarely solved from the top down, I do think the issues can be addressed bottom up. The people have the power and it's only by circumstance that some people appear to hold the power.

After the Panama Papers and everything like it I've experienced in my life, I truly believe it doesn't matter if very wealthy or powerful people are exposed on anything they do unless it involves what Epstein did. Financial crime is not generally of interest, regardless of how interesting it might be to you and me. Sure this can be used to fight corruption, but why is the system corrupt in the first place? Is this really going to be used against those corrupting influences or is it going to be used as another of the many tools in the drug war?

In terms of mental health, drugs that give any kind of relief should be treated as a shelter from the storm so you can rebuild. This means if you're not rebuilding while you're in shelter, your happiness is only going to last as long as your shelter is standing. Drugs wear off, and it is very easy to just want to keep putting your shelter up ad infinitum. This is where the second problem of drugs for relief comes in. The shelter is sub-standard compared to doing the things to build a lasting happiness. You can get stoned as shit, but if you and your life is still in shambles there's only so much that can do.

All the above being said cannabis can help when you need a break. Psychedelics can help as well and microdosing incurs minimal risk. Neither of these will fix any of your problems, but they can enable you to work on your problems yourself when it was too difficult to before.

Alternatively, if you want to avoid drugs altogether meditation can be an option in some circumstances. This is barely a recommendation because meditation is a skill that you have to practice in optimal form consistently before you'll get anything at all from it. It's impossible to actually know whether you're doing it right until you start to feel relief from it and so many things can make practicing mediation as a beginner almost impossible if you're in crisis. If you attempt mediation with absolutely no expectations other than that you will fail at it until you happen to approach it in a way that works you may eventually get some relief from it. If you get it working consistently, it is far stronger than anything you can get legally without a prescription in terms of providing relief. I can give you some guidance if you're interested in this path. Secondarily, Kava can help a little in that it dulls the pain.

Vallerian root, kanna, ashwaganda, etc. might work if you believe strongly that they're working. Avoid depressants like alcohol because although they provide temporary relief they also make things worse when they wear off which can be a terrible cycle.

Mechanically, taking a level in bard has all kinds of utility for a Barbarian. Bards lean into utility and support spells at lower levels anyway and many of these do not depend on the Charisma stat whatsoever.

In my first ever group everyone took a level of bard for fun and we were a literal band of adventurers. I was the Bardbarian.

Façade

It's shocking how much superstition can make it into what should be a more formalized method of treatment. ADHD is a quantifiable proven phenomenon. If someone you trust to be a positive influence to your health doesn't "believe" in it, they don't have a reliable method of sense-making and generally shouldn't be thought of as an authority. They lack they ability to be authoratative about anything except by councidence because they lack the ability to base their claims on reliable evidence since that appears not to be a factor for them.

What is sad is that the people most capable of redirecting the party are also the least vulnerable to the consequences of losing elections to Republicans. They'll be fine. If they happen to get voted out, they can get a consultant job the next day and live a far easier lifestyle. No skin off their nose.

Importantly, the golden age is mythological. Since evidence is irrelevant to conservative beliefs, rather functionality is relevant, the narrative of a golden age is appealing because it is achievable since it was already achieved in the past. What I mean by functional is that it is important that their beliefs serve a purpose but it is not important whether their beliefs are based in objective evidence. This is why conservatives who are fully aware of the complexity of US history want to propogate a sanitized version. They believe the sanitized version instills correct values while telling the whole story would influence people to perform those bad behaviors. It makes sense if you don't think about it, and thinking about it is inherently traitorous.

This is funny but also an excellent example. There are people who honestly believe that, and those pretending to believe that because it's to their advantage that others be made to believe it. They are all humans behaving as humans in the context of the system they are in. Despite having the same tendencies, if these same people were living in a system that leveraged their personalities and talents to pro-social purposes we would have a very different world. The part we haven't figured out yet is how exactly that system would work and also work despite millions to billions of different people interacting with it in more ways that can be comprehended by any individual. This is quite a group project we're working on.

Edit: Whoops, I thought I was responding to someone in this thread. Interesting how much it connects here.

Everyone who has ever interacted with settled humans has been wondering this for thousands of years. The problems we had before settlements were infinitely more managable than having to figure out social systems on this scale. The difference between us and those living under Sargon is that we have way more bad examples to consider. We have no way of knowing the effectiveness of anything in the idea stage, especially since we have inherent limitations of awaress as mortal beings.

It's easy to think that since socially constructed systems are the cause of so many of our issues that the problem to be solved is a few very powerful people conciously choosing to conduct them. If we dismantle the Racism council, the Capitalism council, and the Genocide council there would be no one to run racism, capitalism, or genocide. This is the plot of a fantasy novel, not reality.

The reality of our socially constructed systems is that they are systems. No one is in charge of them, there are only different levels of influence and endless unimaginable complexity of effecting and being effected by those systems. We have plenty of documentation both descriptive and prescriptive of our systems but absolutely nothing which documents the true extent of all interactions happening in any given system, especially considering how much human behavior is driven by motivations we may not be totally aware of.

Of course there are bad actors. The answer isn't to get rid of all the "bad guys" though (this way of thinking drives fascism), because that is impossible and actually has the result of providing opportunities for different "bad guys." In reality good and bad themselves are socially constructed and inconsistently defined. My socialist values that everyone should be fed, sheltered, educated, and loved are not universal. I even think these desires are more or less instinctual but we also have to deal with the world we live in which will lead groups and individuals into ways of thinking which cause them not to consider these goals for anyone beyond their personal "allies" however they define them. Everyone is extremely comprimised including me.

Bad actors in our systems are the ones conducting evil without the willingness to examine what they're doing. It will forever be a mystery how much of that lack of willingness is a concious choice or a literal inability to consider. Because we're all so comprimised, even taking every effort we can to resist these systems is not enough even to offset our contributions to these systems. By being a citizen of the US, I am indirectly responsible for every atrocity my government and society has been involved with. To live, I must participate in this capitalist apparatus in some form, and my small contributions along with those of the rest of the workforce enable the capacity for our other systems to harm us and the rest of the world. My labor and spending, in a very abstract way, bolster the social force of capital.

All this is to say we can't solve systemic issues by pinning the blame on individuals born into a system and not questioning their role in it, especially if that system is to their great advantage. In my experience that is often asking far too much of someone. The blame lies in the systems themselves. Faith in capitalism actually appears to be waning and there is a lot of hope for a more equitable society in the future. Although still horrenous, the hegemonic institutions driving global suffering today are better than the institutions of the 1940's in most ways. There's no guarantee that they can't now develop to become worse than those past systems, but it seems like there are many more of us aware of and challenging these systems that I would like to think ultimately we're moving toward a more pro-social way of life. Information is now permanently more free and communication over any distance is now trivial compared to times past. More and more people are seeing the victims of their systems as themselves, and I hope that means something.