I would ride a bike a lot more if the streets weren’t death traps.

I saw a guy the other day with a shirt that said “On street parking is theft”. I gave him a big thumbs up.

To clarify, it’s not one’s fault for not knowing something. None of us know everything. What’s aggravating is the lack of curiosity.

I think 6th grade is reading for plot. Just a basic plot with a few characters. No complex themes. No unreliable narrators. Limited vocabulary.

I found an online test for it somewhere and it was like

“Sally was born in Canada and lived there until she moved to the United States when she was thirteen. She spends summers in Canada with her aunt and uncle, but spends the rest of the year in Boston. This year, she’s graduating from high school and planning on attending college. She wants to see more of the country, so her top picks for college are in California and Chicago.”

“Where does Sally live during the winter?”

“Where did Sally spend her childhood?”

“Where do Sally’s aunt and uncle live?”

You’re not going to find as many people who read badly on a majority text platform like this.

What percentage of people today do you think even know what the Kent state massacre was?

People seem so fucking incurious it’s aggravating.

I don’t understand how anyone could be a “swing voter” at this point in history. You’d have to be living under a rock in a faraday cage on mars or something

It seems to work. People, all of us, are kind of stupid and when we hear things repeated we remember them. None of us are immune to propaganda.

Repeating something simple, and false, that appeals to emotions is going to have a bigger impact than something longer and complicated.

One of my friends has a C.L.A.W.S pin they got at a cat cafe. Pretty cool.

I wouldn’t even want a partner like the left, all subservient. I want someone who can kick ass and have agency. I don’t understand other people.

It would be kind of funny if one of the teachers that had a gun because of conservative “arm the teachers to stop shootings!” shot a kidnapper that was trying to take students.

I don’t think “every single problem … must be reduced down to an individual failing” is super common, but sure, some people refuse to recognize systemic problems. There are loads of people who say racism isn’t a problem, for example, and that’s bad. Kind of off topic from childhood development and people who refuse to admit fault when it is plausibly their fault. (And saying you’re late because there was traffic because the city refuses to build effective mass transit may be technically true in a sense, but it’s also kind of useless, maybe even counter productive, in the moment where everyone else is waiting for you. Leave earlier. Use the agency you have.)

I got 2 (two) pieces of anti-zohran, pro-cuomo, mail when I checked today. They’re playing Zohran up as a scary risk and Cuomo as the safe, experienced, candidate.

According to the fine print, one of them was from “Fix the City, Inc”, where DoorDash is a top donor. Gross.

I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, in my youth, it helped to actually go out and do the things I was worried about. When I spent all my time home worrying, I just got worse. Once I left the house, went to the party, went on the hike, whatever, I found the reality wasn’t anywhere near what I had worried about

A lot of people here seem stuck on the details of the metaphor instead of focusing on how some adults refuse to ever consider they are wrong or at fault, and that’s a real problem in the world. You probably know someone who never admits fault for anything. If they’re late, it’s because of traffic. If they lose in mario kart, it’s because the controller is bad. If they get lost, it’s because the GPS is hard to understand. Never their fault.

Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

Ur-Fascism, by Umberto Eco

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/umberto-eco-ur-fascism

I’m still laid off. If capitalists want me to spend money, they’re going to have to pay me money first.

Many people use words not because of their commonly accepted meaning, but because of how it makes them feel. “Net zero” sounds fancy and zero is what they want.

You wouldn’t be alone if either party has women friends. I wouldn’t be surprised if the guy in this post had no women friends , or only had women be wanted to fuck.

Also the bisexual erasure is pretty thick here.

Are you unfamiliar with how the passive voice works?

“Man shot by police” vs “Police shoot man” are very different sentences.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/active-vs-passive-voice-difference

Passive voice often gets criticized as a weak and evasive form of expression. But it is useful for those instances when you want to emphasize the fact of an action having taken place rather than who performed the action. It is also helpful for instances when the doer of an action (also known as the agent) is unknown.

[ … ]

The passive voice gets called out on occasion as a tool for expressing the avoidance of responsibility, like when one says “Mistakes were made” rather than “We made some mistakes.” Sometimes, as in our Elm Street example, it is criticized for placing what appears to be a burden of responsibility on the person who receives the action (i.e., the victim) rather than the person who performs it.

Passive voice is for when the state does violence. Active voice is for when a protester does? Got it

(emphasis added)

I am continuously disappointed by my mainstream coworkers. They just don’t know stuff from history, and they don’t seem to care. They seem incurious. Not knowing stuff is fine- none of us know everything. But the lack of curiosity and willingness to engage is disappointing.

Like I mentioned the kent state massacre and they were like, blank stare, topic change.

Of course, they probably think I’m an insufferable killjoy because I keep talking about injustice and stuff. Can’t we all just talk about the iphone?