happybadger [he/him]

Something about Matt Elliott’s Only Myocardial Infarction Can Break Your Heart, especially with the main track “The Right to Cry” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8x1GX8dKvs), always stood out to me as such a vicious title.

“I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees”

I’m going to look for some kitschy artwork at the thrift store and make this into a “Live Laugh Love” style wall decoration.

https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html

I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.

I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress. I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. Actually, we who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. Like a boil that can never be cured so long as it is covered up but must be opened with all its ugliness to the natural medicines of air and light, injustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion before it can be cured.

MLK’s perspective on centrists is perennial. They’re Judas goats.

It’s the cure for Romanovs so I consider it more legitimate medicine

Counterpoint: Rasputin is the Imperial Russian RFK Jr.

It’s wild that OSHA won’t let an employer lock you in an unsafe room with an unsafe machine, but it’s fine if they force you to commute in unsafe conditions with an unsafe vehicle. A tech support job demanded I drive 70km on an interstate in a blizzard just to tell customers that the internet is out because there’s a blizzard. I couldn’t use my much better computer with my much better headset at home. Instead they wanted me to risk my life and my most expensive possession for $2 above minimum wage.

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.