That doesn’t help you understand his supporters though. You have to wade in the shit they call news. You have to hear what they say to begin to understand them.

You’re in a media bubble. It feels like there’s no way anyone could see it differently. The people who disagree with you are also in a media bubble and don’t understand how you could believe what you do.

For everything you said they

• don’t believe happened
• think it was a deep state plot
• believe it’s good actually and believing anything else means you want to kill babies or destroy the economy
• have never heard of it

Reality may have a leftist bias but most people don’t live in reality. Most people live in a reality constructed by corporate media. Social media is largely derivative of it.

“I don’t even know you. You’re not the man I married 5 years ago.”

China’s energy grid is about 80% fossil fuels. Assuming their energy mixture remains unchanged (a bad assumption as their coal usage is on the decline) it would take about 65,000 miles for an EV’s carbon output to break even with an equivalent ICE vehicle.

The waste and suffering involved in carbon intensive fuels is ongoing instead of being single event. One benefit of renewable tech is the recyclability of it’s components. Once we’re made the battery it can be recycled and died not require ongoing extractive mining forever.

EVs have a place in a just future and can do some good at this time. Alternatives to cars are still a far more important and uncomplicated solution to our climate problems

Direct action gets the goods

Explain Like I’m Five

Libro.fm for stuff not at the library

Bike poggies are worth looking into to keep your hands warm. Studded tires can help with slipping too

Thanks! Fixed!

Trees can explode actually 😅 Eucalyptus and Aspen trees are know to explode during bush fires.

They don’t explode unbidden like you might assume given Trump’s comment. He seems to do this a lot; he talks about something real, in a way that demonstrates he’s garbage at communicating anything even remotely technical.

The real solutions is of course tending our forests to ensure there’s not enough combustible material to cause dangerous fires. More resources for the forest service is essential. It makes me wonder if these gaffs are far more effective at directing our attention away from the substance of the problem with Trump

Most taxes on asset sale is based on profit, subtracting the bought price from the sold price. Given the wording the tax would be on the sale price, not the profit.

Hard cases make bad law. Make sure the Nazi’s rights weren’t infringed 😬

I’m a lot less likely to report a crime after the George Floyd murder. Granted violent crime, like murder, tends to get reported regardless of a person’s personal feelings about police, and reported murders are down

I like eco-dent I have some jagged spots on my teeth that most floss snags on. This stuff doesn’t snag and it uses wax instead of forever chemical

The US has, through concerted effort by the right wing, forgotten why FDR came into power. He was the heir of an extremely rich family. He managed to convince enough of the other oligarchs to avert going the way of the USSR. The US had revolutionary potential or the powerful would not have let this happen.

The policies that resulted from FDR’s presidency had an enormous effect on the US’s populace. It completely changed what the average American expected from their government. The politics of the Democrats, and even the Republican, president’s that followed reflected the change that FDR’s policies wrought.

It took 40 years of concerted media, intellectual, and religious capture for the right to regain anything resembling the political ascendancy they saw before the 1930s.

The bone conducting ones make me nauseous so I got a pair of Bose open earbuds. They’re not as good in loud environments but that’s kinda the point. I ride and listen to music with them daily

I don’t know what that has to do with anything. I’m a lefty, life has never mugged me. I’m a leftist because bad things happen to everyone and the solutions isn’t to hurt people until they’re better people. Giving people time and resources just makes people and society better.

I’m going to vote for the democrat this November but I think most folks who talk about this issue are not disingenuous. Voting in the presidential election is a bare minimum, minimally effective political action. For me and most of the people I know it matters almost not at all because I don’t live in a swing state. My local elections matter a hell of a lot more.

There are limits to the effectiveness of electoralism that are worth understanding. I think a lot of folks who talk about the Democrat’s failures are advocating for political action beyond voting. Direct action is a far more effective form of political action that people should be putting their energies into.

Union organizing, renter’s orgs, housing activism, talking to your neighbors, local politics, and lots more are much more effective ways to assert power in your life. Voting makes me feel helpless. We need to act as well. The primary thing preventing positive political change is the belief that we can’t do anything to bring that change about.

I don’t think it’s the source. I think it’s a tool of social control that enables the powerful to create a bare minimum willingness to be ruled. For a long time the doctrine of Christianity was the Divine Right of Kings. Now it’s the Prosperity Gospel. The books did not change but the people with all the money and power ensured the church leaders who served their interest had most of the money and thus followers.

If we didn’t have religion, some other social construct would arise, and I’d argue, has arisen to fulfill it’s role. Modern economic theory justifies the current power order in an unfalsifiable way that reminds me of religion.

Religion could be a liberatory force in society. In fact it has been. The liberation theology movement in South America and numerous heretical movements in the late medieval period are both examples of progressive Christian social movements.

That sort of thing can happen in extreme situations. Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany are the most prominent examples. Both examples involved not having enough stuff. When there aren’t enough necessary goods to buy and people have plenty of money you’re going to get inflation. Using the right combo of subsidies, government run production, purchase quantity limits, reserves, vouchers, and price fixing you can ensure the supply is stable and eliminate inflation even if there’s lots of money.

That’s true. That happens because people are stuck in the narrative of the government needing a balanced budget, just like a household. It also happens because the owners and the corpos use all their money and power to ensure workers pay taxes and thus decrease worker money and power.

Yeah, if the population was educated on MMT the ability to bring corpos to heel would be significantly increased. People arguing for it are fundamentally arguing for a change in how we think about money.