zifnab25

Smoking Kills

Sounds like she knows the amount of work that goes into putting a piece of meat on a plate.

It's still just kinda horrifying - in my mind, at least - to see the detachment she's capable of.

I'm sure they have a great early life I doubt the amount of shear terror they are put through justifies a life worth living.

That is the nature of the agricultural industry. You're one of the sin-eaters of the nation, and - if you're clever about it - you can live comfortably doing the bloody work of the industry for other people.

At the same time, I don't think there would be any real benefit if they just put their animals into big cattle cars and shipped them into centrally located urban wet markets. I'm not sure how the patriarch of every household personally handling the bolt gun and the butcher knife gets us to veganism.

I'll spot one possible benefit. If you had to buy and accept the whole cow, rather than just the choicest cuts, and work your way through the deep freezer before you got another animal, we might cut back on the volume of waste. Its something I've kinda wanted to do myself - just go in with a neighbor on a full sized cow every year and that's my meat allotment until next season - except I don't have the kind of real estate for a proper deep freeze.

But I could see this as a kind of compromise solution for MUDs. One apartment with ten units gets a ration of X animals that are butchered and preserved on site, rather than individual folks floating out to the grocery store at odd intervals buying random cuts and letting the big boxes dispose of the excess every night.

Or doing big cook-outs around a single animal to feed the proverbial village on festival days rather than piling up pounds of dead flesh for the trash heap in order to guarantee something is always under glass when you decide to drop by.

Anything so that we're not just creating life so we can throw it away again, so cruelly and casually.

Fascists reject liberalism. So do populists who think that freedom is overrated.

Many of the marchers misdescribe liberalism; they offer a caricature. Perhaps more than ever, there is an urgent need for a clear understanding of liberalism — of its core commitments, of its breadth, of its internal debates, of its evolving character, of its promise, of what it is and what it can be.

Once again, the problem is not with the politicians or the policies. The problem is with the messaging. You're not hearing me when I say "Liberalism Is Good Things". You're just fixating on the bad things. Bad things which aren't even liberalism's fault! They just kinda happened, okay? Or maybe they were caused by nefarious foreign agents, fifth columnists, and evil dissidents who hate us for our freedom.

Abraham Lincoln was a liberal.

The year is 2023. I am writing an article about liberalism. I am leafing through a history textbook to find an icon that I can raise up, someone who is universally beyond repute and who represents all of the virtues I wish my audience to see embodied. I check the 21st century. Nothin'. Bupkis. Total loss. Okay, lets go back fifty years. Anyone since 1973? No. All losers. They suck. Scratch them. A century? Diddly. I kinda looked sideways at FDR, but had to toss him because he was too much of a pinko. Lets make it 150 years. Anybody? Bueller? Fuck it. Okay, going for the big guys. We just need one big Founding Daddy to really hook into. ~~George Washington~~ ~~Thomas Jefferson~~ ~~James Madison~~ FUCK! Fine, okay. Just roll out Old Honest Abe. He's the only person in the entire country's history we can celebrate as a proper liberal. Hope nobody bothers to know about the Sand Creek Massacre.

We might change "American republicanism" to "liberalism." The idea of a sheet anchor is a useful way of linking self-government, in people's individual lives, with self-government as a political ideal.

The problem with liberalism continues to be the WORDS. We need to rhetorically associate Word A with Word B, so the roiling masses will behave themselves. Check out my newest piece of sheet music. I swear to god, this'll put the babies to bed.

Rejecting despotism

Nobody will ever convince me that power grows out of the barrel of a gun.

The rule of law is central to liberalism.

It is 2008 and I am waiting for a single fucking banker to go to jail.

It is 2012 and I am waiting for a single fucking war-profiteer to go to jail.

It is 2016 and I am waiting for anyone in government to go to jail. Literally anyone. Come on, you both literally ran campaigns shouting "Lock them up!" at each other. You surely gotta!

It is 2020 and it still won't be another three years until you manage a single fucking indictment of the one guy everyone agrees is guilty of all the crimes.

It is 2023 and - holy shit, you actually got SBF. Congrats. You did it. Rule of Law followed.

Liberals believe in freedom from fear

Liberal authoritarianism is an oxymoron

slapping a big thesaurus You can't call us that its against the rules!

Liberals connect their opposition to censorship to their commitment to free and fair elections

They're certainly batting 1.000 on both of those.

Liberals prize free markets, insisting that they provide an important means by which people exercise their agency

Liberals prize free markets, insisting that they provide an important means by which people exercise their agency.

Liberals believe in the right to private property

Strange how you choose to bury the lead with these. But at least now we're getting the heart of the thing.

Liberals believe that people with diverse backgrounds and views can embrace liberalism

Liberals think that on both left and right, many antiliberals and postliberals have manufactured an opponent and called it liberalism

Liberalism is a wide tent.

A liberal might think that Ronald Reagan was a great president and that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an abomination; a liberal might think that Roosevelt was a great president and that Reagan was an abomination.

We stand for nothing! We will say or do whatever you want, just PLEASE VOTE because your nation depends on it!!!

Liberals think that those on the left are illiberal if they are not (for example) committed to freedom of speech and viewpoint diversity. They do not like the idea of orthodoxy, including on university campuses or social media platforms.

Okay, we do - in fact - stand for one thing. Fuck them Leftists over there.

It is true, of course, that if people want the government to act in illiberal ways — by, for example, censoring speech, violating the rights of religious believers, preventing certain people from voting, entrenching racial inequality, taking private property without just compensation, mandating a particular kind of prayer in schools or endorsing a particular set of religious convictions — liberals will stand in opposition.

'ey! We're standin' 'ere!

Some people (mostly on the left) think that because liberals believe in private property, they cannot accept redistribution or cannot prevent economic inequality from leading to political inequality.

And I would refer you to the bit above, where we will say literally anything to win your vote! Even the things that contradict the other things! Especially those things, in fact.

Some people (mostly on the right) think that liberals oppose traditions or treat traditions cavalierly and that liberalism should be rejected for that reason.

And they would, again, refer you to the bit above. Liberals will pander so fucking hard for you, baby.

Liberals like laughter.

I think we can all agree that liberals are good for a laugh.

Some antiliberals (again mostly on the right) argue that societies need not only freedom but also constraints.

Gotta restate some stuff I said above to pad this thing out.

Liberals insist on the difference between liberty and license.

Okay, so hear me out. What if we did a little Legalism? Nobody could object to that, right?

Liberals insist on reason giving in the public domain.

I hope nobody actually read down this far, because this premise is getting a little schwetty.

Liberals look forward as well as backward.

And always twirling, twirling towards progress!

Well, don't know what all that was about, but I'm now too exhausted to argue.

Liberalism wins again!

My wife has never shot a deer in her life, but she's skinned and butchered a few her dad brought down during hunting season. Genuinely kinda terrifying to watch her work.

She does have a cousin that lives out in Victoria and herds cattle as a big part of her family income. They do the whole job, from bottle feeding the calves to BBQing the brisket.

The real problem with people who eat meat is that they haven't completely inured themselves to the screams of the dying.

More Americans should do the FFA thing, where you raise a baby piglet to slaughter weight and then personally tear the adorable creature's heart out with a knife. That's definitely going to produce a bunch of vegetarians and not a generation of hollow-eyed psychopaths. Can't wait till we have more guys like Ron DeSantis, staring blankly into empty space for hours on end, then giggling softly any time they hear the sounds of pain.

KJB had a bit for a minute about insecure trans girls just going to "Girl Names" website and picking the first one they find on the list to get it over with.

Five years later, Alices and Abis are out here rocking your world.

Smaller parking lots, cheaper insurance, fewer staff.

Amazon already has all that and they didn't need to install a bunch of cheapo clear plastic lock boxes to do it.

Walmart's stuck in their antiquated model, sitting on a bunch of worthless real estate in rural neighborhoods with declining populations. Which has more than a hint of irony behind it, given how Walmarts were instrumental in killing all the rival retail establishments and driving down the local wages that gave their turf value to begin with.

Storefronts as last-mile warehouses for distribution make sense when you're within a mile of your buyers. But Walmarts largely aren't, because that real estate was too expensive. They're built out on the fringe and deep into the suburbs where land is cheap. Even the big strip malls and mega-malls don't host Walmarts, because they're too damned stingy. I can get my basic-bitch white cotton shirts from the Academy down the street for the same price Walmart is having them caged and ball-gagged five miles further.

Its crazy to see the Iron Man arc from the 2008 premier to the End Game climax. A guy who is - at least nominally - ostensibly rejecting militarism. He spends several movies fighting the proliferation of his iconic weapons system. But once we get into the Extended Universe arc, he reverts back to his old Arms Dealer roots.

You could say the same about Captain America. His first movie is, in effect, a story about the gulf between being a propaganda guy and being an actual troop. By the end, there's no distinction drawn. He is both The Icon and The Thing at once, and the only sacrifice he ever really makes is resolved when he gets to go back in time and hook up with his high school sweetheart.

They all end up doing this. The first movie is about how Mr. Everyman becomes a Hero, not by having raw power but by having virtues we can empathize with. But by the end, its all Nietzchian Will To Power shit. We win because we all went out and got Upgrades that gave us the Big Numbers. We're Good-Coded analogs of all the villains in our original films.

the three letter agencies murdered him, and then his brother

I don't think you even have to get that vague. JFK fired Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA. Dulles, a man famous for implementing "regime change" abroad, went back to his club house with his old CIA friends. And then two years later, the President's head explodes. LBJ appoints Dulles to the Warren Commission to find out Who Donnit. Then Dulles got to retire to a bunch of book deal money and speaking gigs, while his proteges continued to infest the halls of power through to the modern era.

With Robert Kennedy, it was the same game but J. Edgar Hoover doing the deed. Kennedy was at war with the mob and the Klan, both of whom Hoover needed in his pocket fight against those damned pinko commies. So, once again, a Kennedy's head explodes mysteriously and the FBI gets back to doing what it does best.

The problem is ultimately managerial in nature. Every manager needs to improve metrics over the last guy (and over their own historical performance). So every year, you've got to come up with a "new idea" to improve your figures. Installing all these gates to reduce the incidence of loss makes a key metric improve, even if it hurts revenues overall. So you get points for "fixing a problem" while your real performance is occluded behind the aggregate rise/fall of sales in your region.

And since locked cabinets are a fixed cost that (on paper) increases the value of your unit's capital, rather than a recurring expense, you can occlude the price of the "improvement" behind the rising book value of your real estate.

In the end, these devices are a consequence of our accounting mechanics and our profit-oriented rewards. Even if implementing a policy is bad in fact, we can make it look good on paper. And since all our superiors see are the metrics on that paper, the success/failure of our business isn't realized for years after we've received our bonus and our promotion and the shitty storefront becomes someone else's problem.

This is, increasingly, the solution to the perceived threat of shoplifting. Put everything behind lock and key.

Of course, that kind of set up costs money. And then you need more staff to run around with keys and unlock everything any time it needs to be sold. Patrons find this annoying. Businesses find the security+labor expensive.

The solution to this is vending machines. So in the end, we turn every Walmart into a big wall of GACHA machines.

Milei is the head of a party with virtually no representation in either legislative branch. But I have no idea how much power the President has relative to the Legislature, particularly in a country as fraught with fuckery as Argentina. I can't imagine there's a large coalition of deputies eager to ratify his zanier ideas. So it could be that Argentinans have simply elected themselves a period of prolonged legislative gridlock.

More likely Milei does a heel turn in office and aligns himself explicitly with a coalition of the bigger parties. And then he just does more bog-standard pro-business conservative fuckery, while the right-wing media sucks him off.

I'm sure he's going to come in and start firing all the last guy's ministers and then stacking the bureaucracy with as many dipshit Chicago School assholes as he can manage. If nothing else, this is going to be great for Libertarian sinecures. But as to how productive he's going to be as a policy maker? Idk. Its probably going to just boil down to breaking as much shit at the federal level as he can, in order to clear space for private businesses to claim another big chunk of the national economy and sink the national ledger into deeper receivership to its foreign creditors.