The hell of it is, some people would still be happy to buy his apples. Look, I ain’t got time or health insurance to be fucking around climbing an apple tree, here’s some cash, apples pls. But that’s not good enough for the investors, who want guaranteed 5% growth every quarter, so now we’ve got to pour kerosene on the extra apples and force people to go hungry.
By all polls and sentiment, it seems like it’s going to be a goddamned bloodbath for the tories. I’m actually kinda pumped, I hope they get everything that’s coming to them.
I don’t know how to feel about this election as an ameribro.
I’m left-libertarian (upper case left, lower case libertarian) on the political compass, which is practically not represented in US politics, so I’ll take whatever I can get. Biden is, realistically, the best I can hope for this election cycle. He’s not great, there’s a lot of big policy issues I diverge with him on pretty sharply (both on left and libertarian), but the other candidates for the DNC are a hot fucking mess. As for the libertarian party, it’s actually insane. Gary Johnson got booed for saying he’d want people to have driver’s licenses to drive. That’s a no go for me. And as far as the conservatives go, they run the gamut from not an instant disaster (I guess) to the loud, proud, and complete end of the republic.
Biden has at least done some things that I kinda like, and doesn’t seem keen on destroying the republic. I’d love to get a reformer in and sweep Reaganism out on its wrinkled, swampy ass forevermore, but I don’t think that’s realistic at this point. Where I start getting worried is that the Biden campaign seems dead set on repeating some frankly terrible HRC '16 strats, which, well, we saw how well that worked for her, but the pro-Biden response is “Trust me bro, Trump is actually unelectable this time”. I’m also concerned because, let’s face it, Biden’s old enough that he could get struck down with a stroke or what have you at any minute.* Every day, the cosmic dice are getting more and more weighted against him. The democrats have done very little to make a case for a possible candidate/president Harris, where the republicans have laid a LOT of groundwork against her. If Biden bites it or gets incapacitated, Harris is going to have a huge uphill climb in front of her.
I guess where I get uneasy is that it feels like the democrats are making a lot of avoidable and predictable mistakes, and they’re just banking that it won’t blow up in their face this time because, uh, what, that was that time, this is this time? They could do better, but they’re just going to choose not to, and be shocked if shit goes sideways.
*I mean, so could Trump, but I’m not hoping that he wins.
Well, typically other libertarians like to pretend we don’t exist and invoke the magic phrase “you’re not a real libertarian”, whereas left libertarians prefer to pretend that there’s more than one of us. The tl;Dr is that it’s more of anti-authoritarian take than a pro-free-market take that you’d get from right lib.
On the matter of economics, I believe that free markets work and work well where they exist, which is certainly not everywhere they’re imagined to. In other words, I’m not willing to imagine that markets with baked-in coercion (like healthcare) are free. Free markets require choice and, ultimately, the ability to say no without coming to harm. If I can buy a widget from Bob, a widget from Sally, or not buy a widget and suffer no cost or harm, that’s a free market. I also generally don’t believe in rugged individualism; poverty is, itself, a coercive force in economics. This sort of view is partly how I wholeheartedly endorse mass transit and good urbanism as a libertarian, because being functionally coerced into car ownership isn’t economic freedom.
I also believe that the government does have a right to interfere with gross negligence. That is, if you’re drunk driving, if you’re having a bonfire and there’s a high wildfire risk, or you’re doing something that any reasonable person would understand is an imminent danger to the safety of others around you, the government has an absolute right to make you stop. Most right libertarians think that the government should only interfere with direct violence and that everything else can be settled in court; so basically, if you’re a drunk driver, make sure you kill whoever you hit so they can’t sue you. I also think that this applies to companies and organizations, not just people.
Those are, probably, pretty uncontroversial takes, and you might be thinking “so where’s the libertarianism?”. Well, I also think that the government has massively overstepped its bounds, especially in the last forty years or so since Reaganism. Ready? Here we go. The war on drugs and the war on terror has seen the government giving itself ridiculous powers that need to be culled immediately. The NSA mass surveillance program (which was ‘killed’ by the SCOTUS and resurrected by Obama and the Republicans under the cynically-named USA FREEDOM ACT later that same day) should be erased in totality. The government should not be collecting any data from any tech company on anybody without consent, a warrant, or the data being anonymized (if it’s, for example, for research purposes). The patriot act should be repealed yesterday, and gitmo should be closed because holding anyone without trial is wrong, full stop. No-knock raids should not happen, period, and we desperately need police reform. The entire country is a free speech zone, and protests should not be met with brutal crackdowns. I also think that what happens between consenting adults or what a consenting adult does to themselves is nobody else’s business, as long as it’s without coercion. That’s maybe 5% of the rant I could go on, but I don’t want to write a book, and I don’t think you want to read one.
Also:
-What happens between consenting adults is nobody else’s business, least of all the church or the government. I’m pro sex work and pro LGBT rights.
-I’m pro-abortion rights.
-The government needs to leave the native Americans the fuck alone. 2023 and we’re still fucking with them. The government needs to leave everyone alone, but they particularly need to fuck off on native Americans. That said, I think we should still financially support their recovery as a people and culture from what we’ve done to them, but they should get to decide the shape that takes, not us.
-I’m firmly against borders. If it was up to me, I’d Thanos snap that shit. No more borders. I know that’s an extreme position, and I’d be willing to compromise for an EU-style open borders arrangement.
I’m more anti-authority and further left than your average US liberal. You’re not wrong, though. I once melted a Republican colleague’s brain by explaining that libertarian is different than liberal.
That’s a tricky one. The problem is that power is, more often than not, a one way street. Once organizations or people have it, they tend to not want to give it up. It takes a LOT of effort over long periods of time to walk that power back, and particularly when the money’s against it. The US is already practically a fascist (and I mean this in a textbook, unsensational sense) economy what with how tightly the public-private partnerships run, so you’re fighting a three way battle between getting the government, the investors, and the corporate leadership to all agree all at the same time to decrease their power. The corporates and investors have been getting some really sweetheart deals put of this arrangement, and they’re not going to want to walk away from easy money guaranteed by market coercion.
I think the path of least resistance here is going to be widespread local action, at the level of the state or below. It’s not unprecedented, this is more or less how marijuana legalization went mainstream. If we waited for the policy to change at the federal level, well… [Gestures wildly at the house of representatives] maybe your grandkids will live to see some moderate change. But the states and especially local government have a frankly shocking amount of power, and they beat the feds in legal battles a surprising amount of times when their laws come into conflict, though this is largely dependent on the views of the circuit of appeals court that presides over your area. The fifth circuit are a bunch of authoritarian whack jobs that once heard of the constitution but think it sounds like a pinko hippie, for example. But we’ll never get there if we don’t try, and effecting change at the local level is both possible and realistic. For my part, I’m working on creating the first YIMBY group in central California, and I want to work with others to pressure central valley urbans to have better urbanism, cheaper housing, more public transit, and all around be more livable and affordable.
My views align much more closely with Anarcho-Communism than US conservatism. I’m not an Anarcho-Communist because all evidence I’ve seen thus far suggests that truly functional Anarcho-Communism (which has existed historically) is dependent on small enough communities that there are few to no truly anonymous interactions and/or a strong social cage of norms that ends up being morality police with extra steps.
Basically, yes. Speaking as someone who’s voted third party before, there’s no hope of changing the system by voting third party at the federal level. Game theory on first-past-the-post elections and the absolutely insane amount of money in our elections practically ensures it. The best way to effect change there is to go to some form of transferrable vote or ranked choice vote at the state and local level. There are already some states whose electoral college splits its votes in this way, and the two main parties (and their big donors) hate it because it erodes their ability to take a state’s vote for granted and weakens their duopoly.
In California, we have Tumbleweed, and it’s actually really useful for stabilizing/fertilizing loose, disturbed soils and making shelter for native grasses and plants to start growing near. They also love to fuck with cars by jumping out in front of them at every opportunity.
Increases fire hazard (though may be a hazard primarily to human landscapes).
In other words, it doesn’t meaningfully contribute to the overall ecological fire hazard, you’re mostly talking highway veg fires and stuff, which happen with or without tumbleweeds.
I have kids; neither me nor the other parents I know show off our pictures of them. If we do, it’s usually because we’ve been asked, or it’s people posting stuff to social, which I don’t think is quite the same. If I had to guess, it’s an older generation thing. That said, I DO take pictures of my kids, but that’s almost always exclusively for sharing within the family.
There’s absolutely loads of them around Snelling and Mariposa. It’s a little out of control, though Mariposa 's been cleaning up the woods surrounding the creek, so they may not be as thick as they once were.
Tbh, the worst part is when you pay for it and still get ads anyway. Feels like double dipping, but it’s obviously going to happen because wall street doesn’t like when line only goes up a little.
Apples for sale (lemmy.ml)
“It’s not that hard” (sh.itjust.works)
A lesson in Input Validation (startrek.website)
Here's your horoscope. (lemmy.world)
It's been a stressful week in Engineering (startrek.website)
California in a nutshell (lemmy.today)
America: Getting ready for another election. Rest of the world: (lemmy.ca)
JAPANESE KNOTWEED (mander.xyz)
Random 1-31-17 (sh.itjust.works)
California Native Plants- A community about plants native to CA
c/ca_native_plants lemm.ee/c/ca_native_plants...
And now Bezos is trying to insert ads everywhere (lemmy.world)