BigNote

The US had a strong labor movement before the 2nd world war and into the 1950s when union membership was at its highest and the middle class was thriving and wealth inequality was a fraction of what it is today. What killed it was the Cold war and the spectre of communism which was used by conservatives (there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans back then) as a bludgeon to effectively kill the labor movement over the following decades until Reagan finally put a stake through its heart in the 80s.

That's the short version anyway. There's obviously a lot more to it.

In any case, the good news is that a lot of people seem to be waking up and demanding change. Union membership is on the rise as are other encouraging signs. I'm way too jaded to be optimistic about it, but I'm not as pessimistic as I once was. My own union has won two strikes in the last 5 years, for example.

On the flipside, the left has managed to pretty thoroughly alienate a huge chunk of blue collar workers who should be their natural constituency, so that's not great either.

We are

Born like this

Into this

Into these carefully mad wars

Into the sight of broken factory windows of emptiness

Into bars where people no longer speak to each other

Into fist fights that end as shootings and knifings

Born into this

Into hospitals which are so expensive that it’s cheaper to die

Into lawyers who charge so much it’s cheaper to plead guilty

Into a country where the jails are full and the madhouses closed

Into a place where the masses elevate fools into rich heroes

-Charles Bukowski

Bullshit. Responsible news consumption is how we make informed decisions about the world. It's a critical part of any democracy which is why Burke called it "the fourth estate."

Not at all. For the vast majority of our time as a species we lived in small hunting and gathering bands wherein the accumulation of personal wealth and property wasn't really possible and one's status instead depended on merit. It's only with the dawn of agriculture, about 10k years ago, that the accumulation of personal wealth and private property becomes a thing. For better or worse, for reasons I don't have the time to go into here, agriculture is a kind of ratcheting trap, and once we embraced it we could never go back and never will.

The thing now is to recreate the small-scale egalitarianism that we evolved to live in, but how we do that in the material world we've created is far beyond me.

No, BMI is just an average. It doesn't tell you anything about individuals.

The simplest explanation is usually the right one though.

Where, oh where are all of our apologists?

Maybe still figuring out what the "talking points" will be?

We're all waiting for the inevitable bullshit.

Unpopular opinion time; the US already uses metric/Celsius where it matters; in science, engineering and the military. Where it doesn't matter, we use a weird hybrid system that makes intuitive sense to us and is accordingly perfectly functional and doesn't need to be changed.

Yeah, sure I did. You are a liar and an intellectual coward.

You are a liar and an intellectual coward.

That's fair. The far left certainly can be violent, as it was in the late 60s and early 70s --my parents were actually friends with SLA members in SF in the late 60s, though they themselves had nothing to do with it-- but it's just a fact that far right violent extremists happen to be far more active in our current era.

Various IC organizations have been saying this for at least the last 6 or 7 years, and events have proven them correct; while the far left is certainly guilty of violence against property, the far right has accrued a much higher body-count.

Wages have gone up much more under Biden who after all, inherited a badly crippled economy in the 1st place. Trump talks a lot, makes big promises, tells lots of lies, but meanwhile his only legislative accomplishment was to sign a giant tax cut for the rich that was completely written by congressional Republicans rather than his own administration.

And that's not even mentioning all his foreign policy blunders and the fact that he was an international laughing stock among all our major allies.

I could go on but I won't.