Yeah lmao 'fuck buddy' really makes the other person sound like a human fleshlight. I'd have a hard time saying that one with a straight face, but Americans really have a shitty lexicon for sex and feelings so w/e, prob par for the course.

Uhhh I think it ideally means you're attracted to that person (and obviously can tolerate their personality) and are able to dive head-first into the sexual passion feelings but aren't suppressing the big 'L O V E' / they-are-the-one feelings. If you're suppressing those, someone's gonna get hurt for sure.

First off, I'm realizing that you were obviously just hurt by someone who wasn't honest with you and feel like my response should have been more sympathetic instead of giving you an example of an 'ideal' situation. I apologize if any of this came off as insensitive or made you feel worse. You're not selfish. You should never feel any guilty for being up front about what you want/need. Trying to get your basic human needs met can be hard as hell. Sorry if I trivialized any of that.

I'm also a total weirdo in that I don't really get jealous. A FWB thing works for my personality in the same way that I'm assuming polyamory would (idk, haven't tried it). That doesn't mean that it's right for you or for anyone else. If the way I described my situation/feelings confused you, that probably means that either I'm a shitty communicator (which, obvs, especially over the internet) or that I'm inhabiting a different brain-world that wouldn't vibe with you.

As to the 'good vs great' thing: I'm a pretty easy-going person and get along with most people. I've had a lot of relationships that were 'fine' and that I could have 'made work', but all of which felt like I'd be 'settling' to a tangible degree... which wasn't/isn't something that I'm OK with. Anyone who has dug their heels in and pushed a relationship beyond its natural timeline probably gets what I'm talking about. It's less about finding a 'perfect' person, and more about finding someone who's genuinely great for you.

Idk I did an explicitly FWB thing with someone for ~8 months and it was one of the best romantic relationships I've ever had.

We'd both just gotten out of long-term relationships and were very up front about the whole "It's absolutely not responsible for me to immediately get into another LTR right now so please, please don't pressure me into doing that" thing.

We even had an unintentional-yet-simultaneous drunk check-in with eachother's best friend one night to make sure that we were being honest about our lack of intentions/feelings. She was absolutely gorgeous and I like doing cutesy romantic shit / being a caretaker so I think it took her a while to trust that I had no ulterior motives.

IMO it takes a lot of maturity and experience to say, "Wow I'm really attracted to this person and also enjoy them as a friend, but there seem like a few personality conflicts that would make this only a 'good' relationship and not a 'great' one". We merged friend groups, had a lot of sex, I became friends with her brother, etc... but we were very clear whenever anyone asked about "We're 100% not dating, we just really enjoy going on dates with eachother". One day I called her to hook up and she said she was seeing someone she was really excited about. We all got together and had beers and I was genuinely excited for both of them (which had nothing to do with me giving her 'my blessing' or anything, I think she was just wanted to show him off and knew I would think he was cool).

For both people to feel that way (and communicate it effectively) is probably pretty rare, in the same way that two people feeling "Wow this is my forever person" at once is also pretty rare.

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I mean, pick your incentive:

• The Saudis had been absolutely salivating at the idea of US boots-on-the-ground for decades
• Over the years, multiple scholars expressed the view that the Iraq War was conducted to re-assert the dollar hegemony in the wake of Saddam Hussein's attempts to switch from petrodollar in the oil trade and to sell Iraqi oil in exchange for other currencies or commodities
• Who was the dude in the Bush administration that outright admitted that without the Iraq War, they wouldn't have had the support to pass most of their agenda (specifically the Bush Tax cuts)?
• The entire republican looting strategy revolves around profiting from disaster

I think that the 'safest' normie interpretation is that our long history of overthrowing democracies and funding terrorist groups (i.e. the CIA and the Mujahideen) came back to bite us in the ass.

The more complete explanation is that we never stopped meddling in the Middle East and even if the US wasn't involved directly, 9/11 was either orchestrated with the explicit blessing and financial backing of the Saudis, or that and things were simply 'allowed to happen' with the Saudi's implicit blessing and financial backing, much in the same way that the CIA would back a coup.

That shit is such baby-brain nonsense and would instantly collapse if anyone pressed against it,

Very optimistic. This is how my conversation with boomers usually goes:

"So almost all of your money has come from a salary... and you've spent the vast majority of your life working in an office because if you wanted to have a family you didn't have a choice but to work . For most of modern history, Capitalists were referred to as 'the idle rich' because 'work' for the wealthy is an optional hobby."

"Yeah but I'm a capitalist now. If I work for another couple years I'll have saved up enough Capital to let me retire... you know, as long as the stock market doesn't crash again, which it can't because the last two crashes were improbable aberrations, just like Trump. If you work hard enough, one day you too can be a Capitalist. That's the American Dream."

This mindset is being pushed HARD by anyone in the NYTimes / Sam Harris / Centro-sphere.

It seems like the closer America gets to class consciousness, the harder we get flooded with disinformation.

A few months ago Sam Harris had a best-selling Yale Professor on to discuss 'The Failure of Meritocracy'... it was a hate-listen, but I was hoping that it might have faint traces of leftism. Wishful thinking. The episode quickly devolved into re-defining the word 'Capitalist' to encompass all of the petite bourgeois and most of the working class... and actually, according to our good professor, the only difference between a successful lawyer and Jeff Bezos is that Bezos works more hours than the lawyer, and we should feel bad for how many hours the top 20% is 'forced' to work.

Absolute laser-focused propaganda for the current (and aspiring) Petite Bourgeois.

The NYTimes review is actually more critical than you would expect, but the fact that this got boosted so hard kind of invalidates their latent criticism.

"When he squares off against the meritocratic elite, he keeps pulling his punches, assuring us that its members’ educational credentials really are excellent, that their skills are real and that they work extremely hard. At times he even seems to lament the psychic toll that all that work takes on our white-collar professionals, as though one might simply persuade them to give up their system of privileges.

The book’s most unfortunate blind spot is the past. Markovits asserts that the oligarchic situation we are in today has “no historical precedent,” by which he seems to mean there has never been a social order in which the people on top were there because they worked so hard and thus appeared to deserve what they had."

Degradation is ~1%/yr, we're hedging that the panels will be good for 25-30yrs but nobody has been around long enough to actually know. In good states, the panels justify themselves much sooner than that.

In certain parts of the country solar makes a ton of sense. Others, not so much. If millenials ever start owning houses, hopefully it'll become normal to see panels (and batteries) on most people's houses. Boom, instant distributed power grid... No more blackouts in CA and the west coast as climate hell continues to engulf us all.

Green New Deal could be dope ya'll.

Source: i work in solar

Never forget

https://observer.com/2017/08/court-admits-dnc-and-debbie-wasserman-schulz-rigged-primaries-against-sanders/

As i mentioned, this isn't for me (I've long since abandoned electoralism in favor of my local mutual aid group), this is for my friends/fam that are still fully faithful to our electoral system.

These also happen to be people that spend all day consuming mainstream media and immediately distrust anything that isn't 'polished', which tends to be a hurdle for most leftist media that is either under- or self-funded.

Reply All is pretty good.

"The Least You Could Do" is a hilarious episode about white people venmoing 'reparations' to their black acquaintances.

"The Crime Machine" is legitimately good journalism on how actually-innovative policing work gets subsumed and abused in the most bureaucratic, expected way possible.

For sure, we're still talking about Life Under Capitalism; my point was to illustrate that even a poor-ass McDonald's worker in Denmark still has benefits that are simply unimaginable in America, even if you have a PhD and 'top-tier' job... (6 weeks of paid vacation? 1yr of maternity leave? A fucking pension? Actual functioning healthcare!?, A college education for your child that won't cost $100k++?? etc...)

Stop violating premise #1:

I’m citing the NYTimes because you’re a Lib and you’re supposed to pass this along to your Lib-ass friends.

*Pulls up r/politics out of morbid curiosity... *

First comment:

Have her tested for polonium poisoning. Not joking. It may be the case that her cancer was “accelerated”. Straight out of the Putin playbook.

L M F A O

This is the inverse of the question that David Graeber begins his book Bullshit Jobs with, namely: John Maynard Keynes, in 1930, predicted that a 15-hour work week would be possible by the end of the 20th century. Technologically his predictions were spot-on, so what on earth is being done with all those excess labor hours?

In other words, given that the average person works 47 hours per week (with 39% working 50+ hours per week), what the fuck are those people doing all day? Sure, in certain places like Japanese, work culture ('Salarymen') gets caricatured as being paid to stand around all day and 'look busy', but isn't capitalism supposed to prevent such a thing from happening? Surely, work culture in the West is different?

His research concludes that possibly up to 40% of Americans believe their jobs are utter bullshit and contribute nothing to the world. The kicker is that most of these bullshit jobs to tend be the high-paying ones (Corporate Lawyers) whereas most essential workers are paid like shit and treated like shit.

Being incapable of making any sort of systemic critique, I must assume that the problem here can only be attributed to a handful of Bad Apples™

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