MLK did advocate for pacifism for all but the last few months of his life

I mean this is sort of reframed with the context that he was assassinated for making that turn away from pacifism. I’m not saying that it was the wrong decision even given the hindsight we have now, but it does recontextualize it.

All of those things can be done outside of my house, so I don’t really see any reason why not to. Beard trim, blam, here’s a razor, sandwich, here’s that shit, here’s a bottle of water, the hose is over there, here’s some soap, blam. Even if I’m cooking up the most diabolical and insane homeless person of all time, I can still fulfill all of those requests while also keeping them outside, doing very little, and maybe telling them to also fuck off after if I’m a psycho.

The rest of this is gonna mostly be venting, so you can safely ignore it if you don’t care.

People in america are totally cooked on homelessness, even though they’re, on average, metaphorically inches away from it at any given time. Homeless shelters in america mostly are horrible places to go where your shit will be stolen and they will do nothing. They’re bad for children, they’re full of drugs, and very frequently they have curfews, rules against having animals or pets, rules requiring that you go to religious ceremonies, etc. Homeless people aren’t just like, insane illogical transients. I mean they kind of are, but there’s also a reason for why they do the things that they do, that includes maybe knocking on the door of a random suburb.

I would actually find it more likely in this situation that this random person would probably want to use my toilet since there are no fucking public toilets in america, especially as private businesses will deny use of their restrooms to people who look homeless. Then people get arrested for public defecation, urination, or nudity because there’s nowhere else to go, obviously there’s also mental health, and then all you see is how some guy on the street on fent gets arrested with his pants around his ankles and his asscheeks covered in shit and you think “wow that guy’s crazy” and have no further thoughts. Context is eradicated.

Give someone in america the slightest advantage over the homeless, a shitty suburban flat, with a lower rent, that they spend two thirds or more of their income on, including roommates, and they will still somehow find a way to spit on the homeless after riding the bus into town every day cause they can’t afford a car. They will still live their lives in fear and they will still come to hate the homeless because somehow the person basically making negative income is not able to afford soap or a high-fiber diet.

It’s the “Oh, well, it’s not my problem, that sucks for them, but I’m still allowed to be offended by it.” sort of mentality. You can give them every reason under the sun why hating the homeless doesn’t make any sense, why hating the homeless is immoral, why they don’t deserve it, how they are products of their environment. Still people will desperately cling to it. It makes me understand how racism occurs, I suppose, because it’s the same phenomena. “Ah, well, I understand all of the stats about racism, but this particular member of this particular racial minority, I still hate them personally for acting in line with the statistical average of their group.”. Insanity. It’s as though it’s all just abstract thought goop that has no bearing on anyone’s life, or that somehow I should be the exception to it.

I think it’s gotta be a functional adaptation, or something. Maybe they can prevent themselves from going insane and becoming nihilists if they just suddenly become individualists and objectivists as soon as it becomes convenient, or something. It is not that hard to conceive of a reality in which the person cutting you off in traffic is rushing to the hospital, or, a reality in which they, maybe naively but understandably want to enjoy their expensive car while they still can, or, maybe a reality in which they’re just panicking because they’re late to work or something.

I am an introvert, I am awkward, I hate hanging around people and talking to people. Even I can talk to the homeless when they need someone to talk to, and reluctantly give them money, and rides to places when they ask, since it would otherwise be like two hours and twelve dollars of travel, bus stops, a transfer station, travel, more bus stops, before they get across town to do a fairly basic errand. The social fabric is falling apart. Please be nice, it is not that hard, it costs very little, it happens infrequently, and very possibly if some of you extroverted assholes picked up some slack instead of making things harder for the most maligned, I could go back to my cave.

US oil production hits all-time high

Executive action ordering the closure of border cutting asylum claims in half (according to FOX News)

Aren’t these generally seen as bad things, though?

I’ll also say a lot of this list is basically just routine infrastructure maintenance funding, which was arguably necessary, but I would much rather see a combating of the more institutional problems that led to this infrastructure being in such a state of disrepair in the first place. Expanding a highway, for example, not really something I would say is a great accomplishment. The economic citations are things that I find kind of suspicious more generally, because I’m familiar with the amount of laundering economists can accomplish when they really put their pussy into it. Post-pandemic recovery, for example, I can think of a couple ways to spin that, most of them involve us having taken a very large hit from the pandemic compared to other countries because we had a shit ass pandemic response relative to other countries. Violent crime dropping from 2020 is gonna be a fuckin no brainer, for example, like obviously that’s gonna be the case, I don’t think you can really attribute that to a biden presidency.

Eliminate the padding in this list and back up what appear to be the stronger points and it would be more serious. As it stands, this is more just kind of a gish gallop. You’re just popping a bigass list with no citations and then that’s gonna look more credible while your opposition can’t do much in the face of it without looking like they’re nitpicking or denying reality, even though you don’t have any citations. It might be cynical, but I’ve been on the internet before, so I bet if I push back at all, you’re just gonna tell me to look into it further myself, and that it’s not your job to educate me even though you’re the one who has the burden of proof for making these claims, like how tankies tell me to read theory whenever I ask them questions about books they’ve supposedly read biblically and know so well.

In any case, a lot of these aren’t really fighting against the idea that the democrats just end up as a controlled opposition band-aid which barely does anything before fascism creeps back in and fucks something else up in our shitty pendulum system. It’s not really fighting against that claim, which I would say is the core nihilistic, apathetic claim that has to be disputed before people can be convinced that their vote will do something.

Mostly I find them annoying. I mildly understand the need for human meaning as it kind of, tends to come up later at night, or for the elderly, or when life really sucks or you tend to even just be really really bored right.

I also understand some of the benefits, right, like. As much as people will despise to admit it, you don’t get, say, the number zero without the Muslim science guys, and you don’t get science without the enlightenment which stemmed out of some weirdass Catholic Christian theory guys. and then everyone’s all like, oh no well you can’t attribute that to the Catholics and if anything they hampered progress, and I’d say, well, maybe, maybe, but also maybe science sucks as we commonly understand it and maybe also you can’t really divorce any part of things from their cultural context, or else things get fucky.

On the other hand I find them annoying and I find that all to be totally null and void because the vast majority of people are just using it as an opiate to placate literally all of their anxieties about the world with a bunch of meaningless thought terminating cliche style statements, and even actively reinforce their own participation in some of the worst aspects of their own culture and society even at points in which they really don’t want to or know that it’s horrible and is causing them pain.

So I dunno, mostly it sucks.

haven’t had much of an issue with that as long as I hide duplicates, require posts with images, and then click on the “owner” tab instead of the dealer tab, but I live in a pretty small city, so ymmv.

Probably people would just start needing to host their own video content and share it amongst themselves, like in the old internet