It rings true since it’s based on a smidge of material analysis, and the superficial similarity with leftists steals our momentum (dragging us back at the moment, but attempting to hitch a ride when there’s another Bernie type wave). Protofascist IMO. Vance correctly identifies that there is a bourgeoisie that controls the USA, and that ordinary people should instinctually oppose this, but he draws the lines of the classes such that the “elite” contains people like journalists and nurses, and the “real Americans” includes himself and ski-doo dealership owners and such. This is not new rhetoric, but Vance is actually doing a little analysis so it works well.

For instance, he says that the reason illegal immigration exists is because all the business owners - many of them Democrats - profit from illegal immigration. The low wages paid for under-the-table work push down the wages paid to citizens. That’s true! It’s convincing, it’s material. But Vance goes on to say that the way to stop this phenomenon is not for workers to band together to force business owners to pay them high wages no matter the supply of labor, or even just to make immigration (functionally) legal again so immigrant labor isn’t so cheap, but to keep immigration (functionally) illegal but just make the border even more deadly.

interesting read. my takes

• as always, heartwarming to see that the republican party recognizes that much of their platforms are tremendously unpopular (at least with “moderates”): covid denial, cutting social security, opposing student loan forgiveness, opposing abortion, ties with alex jones / etc all specifically called out as problems with Vance
• they’re awfully worried about JD’s tucker carlson-like Strasserism. He says he supports unions, especially US domestic manufacturing, because they will make the nuclear family stronger or whatever, and opposes globalization. I think this might be compatible with like, Teamsters type right-unionism of the type we’ve seen recently, and certainly JD thinks a realignment will happen and is pushing to get it. But I’m not really sure why Trump’s team in particular would be worried about this - I thought his whole thing was representing domestic and industrial capital, in opposition to international/finance/tech capital from the Dems and traditional Republicans. Maybe the Trump business base is content with its current path
• I find his right-wing class struggle language very scary

on one hand styrene is not that horrible of a chemical, it’s the monomer of polystyrene (Styrofoam) and it polymerizes into Styrofoam pretty fast if you leave it alone

on the other hand jeez that is a lot of styrene. It’s crazy how much plastic we make. The last Ohio spill was vinyl chloride which I assume is the PVC monomer

is inventory info already public? in addition to salting (cool af), maybe a journalist could just happen to publish a “we spent $x on bearcats” piece during your tenure

reminding everyone that the disengage rule was made before blocking worked. Be generous with your comm and user blocks, life is short.

I don’t understand how you think it is helpful in any way. It follows the section where you say that no sparring will allow you to practice maiming attacks. But Get Tough won’t do that either. Then you recommend judo or aikido to minimize harm, which is not the point of Get Tough. (And with any style, you can absolutely knock someone over and they conk their head on the curb and you’re in for a legal battle. Happens to untrained people!) So what were you actually suggesting with the book? Do you think that readers will learn about ambushes and then be able to do them irl, or effectively defend against Get Tough techniques without sparring? Why read this Hardy Boys tier book?

you are only supposed to draw your weapon when you feel your life is in danger

generally yes

the fact that you did not immediately mag-dump your assailant will be used as legally incontrovertible proof that you did not genuinely fear for your life

standards vary by state, you must check your local laws. In my CCL class the instructor literally had us practice shouting “stop stop I have a gun” while drawing, and if they have stopped by the time they’re in your sights you do not shoot. It is so so much trouble and money to shoot in self-defense, even if you have no heart you should do everything possible to avoid it for selfish reasons. (And if you expect these worst-case scenarios and carry to prevent getting killed, you should also buy CCL insurance to deal with inevitable legal aftermath of a shooting.) If you do shoot somebody several times in the chest they’re probably going to die - every shot is to kill and you should practice if you carry.

I don’t think reading Get Tough without sparring is very helpful.

boxing? lots of cardio so you can run away, looks like a “fair fight” if you can’t. It’s good to have a ground game from BJJ, but if you take someone to ground their friends are probably gonna jump you, and if they were alone you probably could have run away.

I’ve never been in a situation where I needed to fight my way out. If I were to encounter one I’d probably be carrying a gun anyway. IMO, you could also train for fun, fitness, street fighting, etc; be realistic about your self-defense needs.

if you’re from Mars

no clue, never had one. I’ve had some friends who did logistics(?) work that seemed to be mostly emails. One that worked at wind turbine company, her job seemed to be mostly emailing vendor fairs to make sure that they could set up a booth there. No idea what her job title was.

Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs (book not essay) presumably has some examples since it’s the source of this line of thought. I haven’t read it

I can speak to scrum master, I was one for a while. On a programming team you have a bunch of devs who ideally wouldn’t do any work and management (a project manager?, a “product” guy, etc) who wants to get as much work as possible out of the devs. The scrum master is supposed to help them reach a compromise: a limited amount of work, with a reasonable amount of flexibility in when it’s done, but on a wider scale it is legible and predictable to management so that they can make business plans. To this end the scrum master runs planning meetings and helps break development work down into sensible tasks, the length/difficulty of which can be roughly estimated. If you don’t have a scrum master, management is constantly making impossible requests, asking the team to do 180 degree turns, etc., and also it’s really hard to estimate software progress so basically nothing gets done on schedule and everyone is mad all the time. In effect it’s a limited-mandate negotiation job on behalf of the developers.

In my opinion this is not an email job, but maybe at large companies with more opaque management it is. /u/chickentendrils is spot-on about why it exists.

none of those words are in Das Kapital

Had to do it once before, when my accelerator got stuck under the floor mat. Nice to have the option.

oh nice I couldn’t find it on libgen and tried nothing else

fair enough. have a nice day

how do you know he’s autistic? I didn’t find anything about it when looking him up. Couldn’t find a social media bio.

I’m not placing moral blame. Doesn’t matter whose “fault” it is. If Marxists are to be effective, we need to understand the world around us, so we should do some investigation. Editors could write better headlines but the bourgeois press was not built to educate leftists.

you should post the link we haven’t read it

idk seems backwards. scientist is publishing a good study. in a vacuum we’re happy about this. it’s a good development. But the headline centers the bad worldview of the editors and maybe laymen. (I certainly wouldn’t say that autistic adults don’t “experience complex emotions”, and most allistic people probably wouldn’t either if asked. Idk maybe there are polls showing differently.) And we react to the headline. So now, in response to good news, we are more upset than before. I don’t like that. What’s more, this manufactured outrage reinforces exactly the wrong ideas about the state of the world. What will you remember more from looking at this screenshot, that allistic culture is as bad as the editors think or that scientists are in fact working to “[shape] a more holistic approach to understanding people and interacting socially and allowing neurodivergent people to be themselves” and getting at least some acceptance from other scientists since they’re getting published?

I want everybody to stop headline reacting. It’s not unique to autistic users. Often on hexbear I encounter obviously misleading or false posts that fall apart after a cursory search and/or skim. Memes posted as fact (ukraine ryan gosling kill list, turkish shooter dude), outright fakery (twitter whitelisted slurs), bad science journalism (Small Penises and Fast Cars: Evidence for a Psychological Link, this was posted because a jpg of a different graph went big on twitter and there were a bunch of garbage articles about it). I find this frustrating. We shouldn’t recreate . Maybe this is inherent to all social media that prioritizes most-interacted-with posts.

you should be aware that headlines are often written by an editor, not the author. This is why I don’t pay much attention to them, especially in science journalism. You’ll get a paper published like “In vivo effect of XYZ on telomeres” that says XYZ extended rat lifespans by 1%, an interview with a scientist that says “nobody has tested this on primates yet, but helpful molecules in XYZ class could conceivably be discovered within a few decades”, and a headline that says “XYZ PROMISES ETERNAL LIFE WITHIN THE DECADE”. Whatever gets clicks and/or outrage gets published.

I think that hurtful and inflammatory posts are the ones we need to double-check before sharing more widely. Especially screenshots like this that have a reaction built-in.

study author in article:

“We spend all this time problematizing autism, rather than doing the work to understand what it’s like to be autistic,” he said. “The popular idea that autistic people don’t have rich, emotional lives is simply not true.”

[…]

Instead of urging changes to how autistic people communicate, he said, anyone who has an autistic person in their life should work instead to improve mutual understanding between those who have diverse modes of experiencing the world.

as always, ignore headlines

do spaces like that exist? maybe some corners of tumblr. I think this is a common experience for young boys having their first crushes.

Grown feminist men are supposed to have figured out how to relate to women as other people so they’re not paralyzed by trying to talk to them. Even without explicit theory you learn not to put women on pedestals. Posting this kind of stuff would look like softboi performative harmlessness (usually a lie), and it would be weird to try and combine that with an open expression of desire anyway. If you are a left-of-center man who’s attracted to women, the cultural norm is to shut up about it because the misogynists are saying gross shit in locker rooms and you don’t want to do that. There’s not really space for healthy/nonthreatening desire yet.

Grown anti-feminist men are supposed to have learned a specific script of heterosexuality (PUA, etc) to follow, where they are in control of the interaction and set the terms of it. For these men, open expression of harmlessness or being disarmed by a woman’s gaze or whatever makes you a cuck and is therefore verboten.