just a different kitchen worker here chiming in to say that Bourdain's book may have been your window, but people live that life every day and most of them don't get to write a book about it. I'm a dishwasher and prep cook by time worked, and more than half of that meme relates to me without ever having read some dead asshole's book

The people who make decisions on the scale that could affect climate change are content to change nothing but accellerate automation in all economic sectors and prepare for collapse/accellerate it because they're all malthusian ecofash nutjobs who are convinced they're the only worthwhile souls on the planet, so dash your hopes for anything else, this is basically kill or be killed stuff.

bumping because the march of time is ceaseless and paired with unending increase in expenses :-|

if anybody has job ledes for the seattle area for someone with like a HS diploma and six hours of college credits lmk as well

tbqh if you're not conceptualizing these sorts of people as an honest to God enemy, like the kind you actually go to war with - the kind that represents an existential threat to you and everything you love - you need to be.

can we please, collectively, do more than nothing while EVERYTHING continues to get worse?

d2i

I've been in exclusively male spaces, i've been in exclusively female spaces, i've been in mixed queer, and mixed het spaces. Just a product of being in the closet and cis passing, and later out of the closet and trans - it's all complicated, but I feel like, in terms of what can be typically expected, the cis male spaces were the most emotionally constipated ("I feel safer talking to a tree..."), but in general cis culture doesn't seem to provide a lot of space for real emotional availability? Like to be quite honest I didn't start learning how to be truly myself until I began to feel at home in queer spaces - cis white western culture is a place where people are wound the fuck up and masking several layers deep, and generally scared to be themselves, and there is almost always some mal-adjusted fucker, no matter the group composition, that'll use vulnerability against you in any given social space - so people get scared to be authentic.

There's something deeply unwell if most people feel like a tree has more to offer them emotionally than another human being, no matter what though.

Honestly can't say this validates electoralism without qualifiers, as beating a nazi within an inch of their life is explicitly direct action; electoralism coming in for the utility save and getting her immunity is an asterisk'd W at best

To everyone that's helped: thank you so much. Bless you all. Giving this a bump in the hopes i can get a little more to cover what I can while regular income is absent, but it has been heart warming and humbling to see the solidarity with which this community operates. God bless.

controlled opposition sure looks weird in the uk

"

I'm longposting and there's nothing you can do to stop me.

It really is quite the coup, a cultural victory for liberalism and conservative values that there are a ton of people who think they understand politics because they plug into a few places, like the cable news giants and places like NYT, and the associated internet sphere. Like, they obviously don't have any of it in fact. If you try to discuss politics with any depth, setting aside any kind of marxist tendencies I have - just discussing politics, morality, philosophy - how unread everyone is. Like, the ignorance of the average liberal is profound. When they do read, it's the people that are allowed to be platformed on those media outlets, so nothing that doesn't already confirm their own worldview, and nothing of any intellectual substance - anything that might confer intellectual rigor is mysteriously absent (it's so those on the lower rungs economically are not empowered to realize liberals are taking them for a fucking ride).

There is a caste of them that know exactly what they are - they hold identities that the far right desires to exterminate, or they have loved ones in that category, but are otherwise deeply conservative people. They may or may not be in denial about that, but that denial doesn't change anything. Their empathy extends exactly as far as where their own self interest lies - but these aren't even the norm - the norm are people who think they can navigate politics with nothing but their own reckoning and the slurry of bad takes and platformed liberalism, along with the conditioning they're fed to distrust anything outside of that bubble - they're conditioned to stay in place and never actually challenge their own views - to take it for granted they've got it figured out already.

Liberals get uniquely gassed up by their media to feel like the smartest, biggest adult in the room, which is a position that, as a feature, does not require self reflection, introspection, or further education. You're already at the apex, the only thing left to do is force other people to receive your Maddowian Wisdom, and it would be funny if it wasn't actively choking off left-wing inroads into popular culture and (more importantly) political gains - electoral and otherwise.

The far right leans into messaging that weaponizes and even exalts ignorance - and where it has any intellectual investment - is spent similarly exalting their big boys - but seeing as this cohort is expressly an enemy, they're an uncomplicated problem to deal with. Liberalism, on the other hand, is an active menace to the left, and in tandem with infiltration/suppression, is the main weapon in preventing any meaningful political gains by the left.

It fucking sucks. But if you want to tear them down, you kind of need to start with the ways in which they make themselves intellectually unassailable. Most aren't open to it, but I've managed to radicalize more than a few - it just takes work and patience.

When I'm comfy, I have no problem expressing femme or at least non binary, and people affirm this, but when i'm uncomfortable, if I'm really done to the nines and there's no mistaking my presentation - i come off as a bitch - but if i am in normal-ish clothes - a femme top and blue jeansx or something - i just get misgendered and coded masculine.

It takes so much work for the cis world to recognize me, and I feel that too.

I am genuinely inwardly feminine, but I was alive for almost three decades before i started transition, so I have just under a decade of acting femme, in my early toddler years, and in the five years since i started this journey - in between is decades of living as a 'boy', and a 'man', and that coding is still more or less the default "server offline" behavior - when I have nothing else, i retreat into the little stoic stern sadboy shell I spent 28 years hiding in. I hate it :|

How do you all deal with dysphoria? For me, it's actually difficult to notice in the midst - even though it absolutely intrudes on my quality of life in severe ways, I only notice it when I mitigate it, and during extreme moments, like bigoted encounters. Because of this, there is a subtle, cumulative effect that begins to grow when I don't live within the bounds of my maintenance, presentation, and behavioral routines. The thing is, I absolutely resent, like loudly fucking HATE not being able to just be and exist and have that be okay. The fact that I have to mentally and physically reaffirm to myself nonstop, in every possible way, that I am feminine, is driving me insane. I just want to be, but if I do that, I end up becoming dysfunctional as dysphoria feeds into depression and the dropping of my routines, i retreat socially, and all kinds of functional behavior falls apart as dysphoria ramps up.

I have issues with my facial hair, which i can't afford to get removed right now, and there are surgeries i'd like, but I am mostly happy with what hormones have done by themselves to me physically. So body wise a lot is fine... However, in all matters social, I just want to ambiently "be", but I literally get miserable if I don't express my feminine side enough. If I don't keep myself dressed up, shaved, and able to look at myself and go "yeah you're a girl" to the mirror, and believe it, I fall the fuck apart.

I don't know if there are mental tricks, if there are ways to make myself comfortable with the work of constant self affirmation of my own femininity? I am aware this understanding of who I am and what I need is largely localized to my own experience, but I guess I'd like people's insight if this post resonates with you at all.

while you were learning skills and hobbies, or going outside and talking to actual human women, i was jerking off to anime girls and AI generated porn so much that it twisted my brain into gooey mush and now i think a normal looking, quite beautiful middle aged cis woman is too masculine or ugly or whatever and I promise you, I am merely the harbinger of what is to come. You people are not ready for the world we will build.

Fuck you, i had genuinely forgotten almost all of this. FUCK YOU.

something tells me you don't actually speak for most people

I really, really hate this guy. Just the worst kind of "I'm the smartest boy in the room" shit coming from a completely mid intellect that's been gassed up as the ueberboer his entire life. Load bearing toxic copes as central pillars of his identity. Viciously hateful takes and barely coded white supremacy nonsense. There's a lot there to despise, but I gotta tell you that unless it leads to his actual downfall, and it won't, how can anyone care about an accusation of something that's been obvious to anybody paying attention?

This guy made a car to spec on an apple 2 edutainment program and made it real. He's the worst.

I once tried to write a scenario where we were made initially as entertainment, creation itself being a kind of sandbox where different ideas got toyed with, earth and its dramas being a fairly specific little sub project that largely served to be interesting - if the creator deigned descend into and experience any given life, he had a reasonably unique experience to undertake. This was achieved by making storytelling machines, basically governors of different aspects of creation, and placed them somewhat at odds, but ultimatley in a context that meant the tug and pull was collaborative - the archons of the apocryphon of john were my inspiration there - with a chief governing storyteller that more or less set an agenda- a mix of archon stuff and demiurge stuff - basically he didn't make the table, but he sets the table.

As the creator got bored, eventually experiencing all but a derivative subset of experience - he moved on, and appointed the head storyteller - the demiurge basically - to rule in his stead.

Then he came back, realizing humanity itself had some interesting properties that were worth elevating, but the storytellers basically rebelled because they were used to bossing these little deranged ape-things around and couldn't imagine letting them rise above them, when there was no real path for them to ascend beyond their own station.

Because of the powers abdicated to the storytelling machinery - and because they're all a subdivision of the divine will, we're caught in a stalemate - the fall of heaven detailed in stories like Enoch are the driving theme for that material - basically satan is merged with the concept of archons and the demiurge - is largely due to a quirk in how everything we experience was generated - the supreme will abdicated power to a subset of itself in the interest of making sure humanity had some kind of guidance and found it wasn't as easily revoked as it was given

anyway i didn't finish the story because i'm shit at metaphysics and i have the attention span of a weevil.

also i didn't know how to reconcile omniscient omnipotence with a situation where the divine will could be defied, even by itself.

Sidestepping theism/atheism because i seriously couldn't care if somebody does or doesn't believe, but personally I like the concept of eyn sof, or the 'first cause' to describe the real creative force behind the universe - and anything lesser is basically just a roided up version of a human soul, which is to say, flawed and created - and anything close enough to us to appear to us or issue dictates to prophets or w/e is probably something created and therefore beneath worship.

I feel like any kind of actual creative force behind existence probably doesn't give any particular shits about what we're getting up to.

if social legitimacy lies behind embracing corporate impositions while licking pig boot, then i don't want it. War it is.