I faced this problem a lot on reddit when my subreddits took off. The closest I got to identifying a cause was with the volume of posts. At a certain point, the daily volume is so high that posts have to compete for attention to get on the front page. The quicker a post can be read, the faster it will be upvoted and the more the algorithm will weight it because it got early interaction. This gives posters an incentive to make memes, images, and jokes instead of an effort post that takes ten minutes to read. New users attracted to the snowballing population see a page full of these posts being upvoted, so their default incentive is to post what already works. Old users are turned off by the stale regurgitation of the worst posts and leave, so you only have new subscribers posting references to things they weren’t there for.

Hexbear has remained pretty consistent even back in the 2016-2020 r/chapotraphouse days because it’s consciously meta-modernist. We’re coming out of irony-poisoned postmodernist forums like reddit and hate how that shaped interactions. The in-jokes have their role but aren’t the feature, with effort posts being something the community rewards. Usually comment threads will have good discussions because they’re niche topics that the users are passionate about, and removing downvoting helps to discourage anything but discussion even when you disagree with someone.

That’s my default for most dishes with the addition of mushroom powder for extra umami. It’s a versatile base to expand on for the specific flavour profile of the dish, and alone it’s enough to improve any generic thing I cook without dominating the flavour.

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.

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.

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.

Thankfully it hasn’t made it into my workplace yet. We have a quarterly newsletter that someone tried to submit ChatGPT slop to. It was immediately identified and rejected by the rest of the horticulturists. My bosses are the kind of people who only talk about plants in Latin so there’s a big institutional focus on getting the right information from primary sources and then using multiple layers of expert review.

However, we’re facing massive budget shortfalls over the next few years and I doubt that will get any better if the economy crashes. Outside of installing/maintaining plants, the bulk of the job is intellectual and creative labour that the public isn’t even aware of. I can absolutely see my workplace hollowing out the job and not hiring based on expertise. Instead of five people with scientific degrees debating a space for an hour, at some point it’s going to be someone who hasn’t seen that space feeding words they can’t pronounce into an LLM that doesn’t understand what space is. On paper it will look great for the metrics admins and other departments track. In practice it will immediately ratfuck everything that makes our urban forest function and drive away the really rare pool of overqualified people we have.

Healthy slop

Start by sauteing a mirepoix. If you’re doing meat or mushrooms, saute those until browned as well. Then anything healthy goes in the slow cooker with some stock until it’s slop. If it’s something that gets sweeter when roasted, it’s roasted first. I season it with a bay leaf, mushroom powder, onion/garlic salt, black pepper, and whatever works for the protein. I like my soups/stews very earthy and comforting, with healthy slop ending up being like a non-acidic borscht or thicker chankonabe.

A cargo ebike. No insurance (very cheap anti-theft insurance if you want), no registration fees, $20/year in electricity. I can get anywhere in the city as fast as driving but that’s no longer stressful. Instead of being stuck in traffic and dealing with road raging drivers, I get to zoom along nature paths with the strength of an Olympic athlete. My commute feels liberating instead of like the first and final insult of my day. It’s the first thing I’ve purchased since a smartphone that feels like it’s a foundational 21st century technology. Most of my problems with 20th century development go out the window with it.

What really fucks things up is that I’m next to some of the most fertile agricultural land on the planet. You can dig 3m down and still have beautiful black topsoil that grows anything you throw in it. These grasslands used to be 2m tall and so thick that missionary convoys looked back and couldn’t see the footprints of their hundreds of members. All of that land is used to grow corn and soybeans for cattle. The people driving four hours from food deserts to pick through the scraps of our grocers are doing so from land I would kill to farm on. I could provide those entire communities with countless healthy calories if I could afford the land that currently feeds cows whose beef I can no longer afford.

The Grapes of Wrath should be required yearly reading for adults. The only difference between its 1930s setting and now is that everything is Oklahoma. I can’t flee to anywhere better than the place I can’t afford to live in anymore.

edit: Required reading and they get a free gun after completing a short essay about the themes.

I can drive about 200km for the cost of a combo meal at a fast food restaurant. My average weekly grocery bill for one person is maybe $100, up 50% from five years ago, while my hourly wage is $17.50 and nobody is hiring. Especially in the American West where things are as spread out as like the Mongolian steppes, it’s wild how driving 80km+ is a normal commute from towns where you can’t buy healthy food.

The local foodbanks are so overwhelmed that they restrict access to people who live in the city or county. Our surrounding counties are poorer agricultural ones, some in red states without our state-level welfare funding to offset the loss of federal funding, and their residents will drive hours to use our food banks. We’re really defining the hinterlands with this crash.

Give yourself time and space to distance yourself emotionally from it. Delve into something that lets you reestablish your identity and do independent personal growth, then use that regained confidence to find the kind of relationship you want. I just hike exhaustively until I no longer think about them or care what they’re doing, becoming more of a naturalist which helps my self-worth. In that community I can find people with similar politics who make better partners. If you try to rush your recovery from that relationship or turn to self-destruction instead of growth, you just further entrap yourself in the patterns that resulted in the last one.

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Social democracy is objectively the moderate wing of fascism.

I just have a sense of morbid curiosity about 2028. How little will democrats have learned from the past decade? How can they possibly fail in a more embarrassing way than 2024 or install a more embarrassing person than 2020?

This is liberalism’s moment to really eat ass+hair.

If they have nothing to hide, they shouldn’t be afraid.

Favourite: civic infrastructure. I turn a lever and safe water comes out. If my entire city uses the bathroom at the same time, nobody gets cholera. I’ll be warm this winter. I can bike on a flat path to a lake owned by the public, then charge my phone for it at free and browse hexbear instead of looking at that lake. When infrastructure works and meets our core needs it’s a miracle of collectivism.

Least favourite: Atomisation and the idea of isolated “first/second/third place”. There’s no reason a park can’t be as educational as a university class or as enriching as a wilderness or as productive as a homestead, other than we choose to develop it for one limited set of recreation use. Downtown cores don’t need to be hyper-commercial, hostile spaces that are unsafe to walk around but we develop them for the benefit of capital instead of pedestrians. The ideal garden city is intensely focused on critical geography and situating people in a larger socioecological project. The lines should be blurred between grey and green space, between commercial/residential/social, and between human/natural enrichment as much as possible. It’s all the worse when you bring in the separation of town and country with those rural communities alienated from civic infrastructure and cultural participation and the urban communities alienated from touching something other than grass.