happybadger [he/him]

No worries at all! I like Scott’s work a lot. Weapons of The Weak is one of the books that got me into peasant studies and changed my whole urbanism outlook.

I’ve suspected a dyscalculia diagnosis for a while. Everything up to elementary algebra clicks with me in some fundamental way where I can intuitively do a four digit multiplication table in my head or a pharmacological weight calculation in an ambulance. It’s just like any other knowledge base to me. But then everything after that, at least through the high-level trigonometry and general calculus classes I took along with the sciences that are equation-heavy like chemistry/physics, feels like I’m illiterate no matter how much I read. Meanwhile classmates in those labs were doing the same work as intuitively as the practical side of medicine comes to me.

Applied science is definitely the route for me to take either way. I like doing anti-Cartesian science with a sense of praxis to it. I’d be shitty at the level of programming or biochemistry it takes to be a good research horticulturist, but I can interpret those studies and use them as best practices while turning my city into a living lab for my politics.

:yea:

me: “I would have job stability if I studied a harder physical science, but there’s no way I could do all that maths. I should study plants. I can touch them, so surely they aren’t just maths.”

plants: exist in fucking calculus

I once dated a UX developer. Their entire identity revolved around the fact that they made $120k per year, a duke in the labour aristocracy, and how much they loved the creative challenge of making a user-friendly interface. Their company? It designs smartlocks for luxury prepper bunkers. They told me that there was no backdoor built into the keypads they were programming 12 hours a day. They literally designed the thing that will kill them when they flee to the mountains next to them. It was a fun creative challenge to make locking them out of a tech CEO’s bunker more user-friendly.

It’s such a particular kind of Engineer Brain derangement. Motherfucker you live in the Andor Prison. You build the death star gear to bomb your own planet. You cannot be proud that you earned flavour in your slop ration that shift.

Marxist ecology/Marxist geography are what I’m trying to go all the way to a PhD with but there are very few avenues for it. The work of theorists like Richard Lewontin, James O’Connor, David Harvey, Paul Burkett, Kohei Saito, and especially John Bellamy Foster is exactly the kind of stuff I want to do in applied science. Urban greenspace is one of those ultimate interdisciplinary subjects that demands being as radical as reality itself.

Luckily it meshed well with my other interests and politics so it was just one more piece in the Manmade Horrors Beyond Comprehension Puzzle. I can deal with the rest as an absurdist and absurdism lends itself beautifully to a field like horticulture.

:yea: Whenever I’m working next to a turf lawn, I always take the time to remind whoever I’m speaking to that living within 1.6km/1mi of a golf course increases your risk of Parkinson’s Disease by 126% and that sharing a water supply with them in our drought-stressed region increases the risk by 96%: https://www.parkinson.org/blog/science-news/golf-courses . Whenever a suburbanite reaches Peak American Psychosis and gleefully describes how they murder any wildlife that touches their property, I start going into cascading impacts and zoonotic disease. If I wasn’t a communist, the socioecological side of horticulture would force me to become a communist or a prepper. When you can see the world ecologically it’s just a world full of slow motion car crashes with all the drivers cheering at each other.

:cyber-warrior:

I can’t look at something like a Terry’s Chocolate Orange and see “natural processes”. This was the divine work of Willy Wonka.

It’s Baby’s First Thought Terminating Cliche. I can’t hear it without remembering that perennial tweet about someone’s grandfather being the most steadfast anticommunist they know because he’s illiterate and communist propaganda could never reach him.

>/u/basketballfan7 has replied to your comment in /r/mycology- “wow thanks kind stranger! this is very helpful advice. I like foraging for mushrooms too and can’t wait to visit there.”

>click profile

>[everything else they post is Horny Mein Kampf]

I hate this version of it. Kicking the first Nazi out of the bar is so critical because they infect the non-political subforums. Every hobby, regional, and news aggregation subreddit immediately fills with fascists while the non-fascists don’t want to drink in the Nazi bar. Then all of a sudden you’re acting as Yelp for people who don’t think you’re a human and want to kill you, funneling them to your favourite spots and inviting them to your meetups. Reddit always felt like playing Russian roulette with posting. The feds and Nazis here are segregated to the Nazi bars that everyone can easily identify as such.

I’m just as much a socialist as you, but all of my positions conveniently line up with the US State Department’s and the only through line is violently enforcing white supremacy. Stand back while I use the word “tankie”

I just can’t do 90s zany/wacky. It’s such a godawful style of postmodernist comedy which set comedy back like 15 years. Even the Joe Rogan anti-woke shit isn’t as damaging in how much it shapes mass media.

Campy horror isn’t a genre that I watch in general, but of the films I’ve seen I can’t think of another which tries to be as zany as Wishmaster. It’s like a 2010s reddit thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnBupO_Kjto

It’s better than Rob Ford at least: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMIrlvJfgvE

It’s too derivative of everything that came out immediately before. I only found it because I was looking for other 1990s devil characters to find the one where Brad Pitt speaks Jamaican patois. This is the one without any redeeming qualities. Bad effects, acting that’s directly lifted from other 1990s characters by bad actors, zany comedy- entirely forgettable.

He’s trying to play the devil but comes off as the lead character from Sling Blade.

I wish I didn’t. It’s a terrible 1990s film called Wishmaster where the top guy is a Djinn who finds obnoxious ways to kill people with their wishes. He does that smile the entire film.

I can’t pinpoint the exact unit, but that’s an A-37B Dragonfly on the patch. It’d be sometime between the 70s and 80s.

“We just receive orders from the chain of command,” Zhao said. “I was in the military. Everything we do here in the federal government is just like in the military. Follow the chain of command and so on.”

https://redsails.org/discours-sur-le-colonialisme/

First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism; and we must show that each time a head is cut off or an eye put out in Vietnam and in France they accept the fact, each time a little girl is [assaulted] and in France they accept the fact, each time a Madagascan is tortured and in France they accept the fact, civilization acquires another dead weight, a universal regression takes place, a gangrene sets in, a center of infection begins to spread; and that at the end of all these treaties that have been violated, all these lies that have been propagated, all these punitive expeditions that have been tolerated, all these prisoners who have been tied up and “interrogated,” all these patriots who have been tortured, at the end of all the racial pride that has been encouraged, all the boastfulness that has been displayed, a poison has been distilled into the veins of Europe and, slowly but surely, the continent proceeds toward savagery.

And then one fine day the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect: the gestapos are busy, the prisons fill up, the torturers standing around the racks invent, refine, discuss.

People are surprised, they become indignant. They say: “How strange! But never mind — it’s Nazism, it will pass!” And they wait, and they hope; and they hide the truth from themselves, that it is barbarism, the supreme barbarism, the crowning barbarism that sums up all the daily barbarisms; that it is Nazism, yes, but that before they were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole edifice of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.