Yes, WW1 was taught to me in school as coming out of a tense political situation that spiraled out of control before anyone knew what was happening, almost sort of like a freak natural disaster.

Everything made so much more sense when I read Gravity’s Rainbow with the way it portrayed the world wars as inevitable horrendous colonial violence turned inwards (which was bound to happen eventually). At first I was really confused why Pynchon included so much about the Herero peoples of Southern Africa, what did they have to do with WW2? Then I started to learn more history, I read the great article in the guardian on the 100th anniversary of WW1 about how the violence and genocide of colonialism was a direct path to the mass killing and violence of WW1

https://theguardian.com/news/2017/nov/10/how-colonial-violence-came-home-the-ugly-truth-of-the-first-world-war

It isn’t gambling for the rich though, more like the big loud distraction (that happens to kill lots of people) put on to distract everybody else from them robbing us all blind (on both sides of whatever war you can imagine).

To be fair, war is actually a lot like gambling, most of the time it is boring sameness run through with a constant low level anxiety and then when something changes it happens abruptly with no warning. The difference is that when the unusual punctuates the boredom and you win in gambling you get money but when the jackpot sounds on the slot machine of war and something unexpected happens it usually means you are about to die.

Honestly, that sounds like a great lifestyle fit for you, but for many people there is a huge risk in that lifestyle in becoming extremely isolated from other people and not feeling like there is an easy way to escape that isolation.

A couple of mile walk into town is not the kind of thing someone who is feeling down but wants to maybe meet people is going to do unless the bicycling infrastructure is pleasant and easy to use. It also leaves you heavily dependent on having a healthy body to socialize which again I think is generally a bad idea as it is the times we are in poor health that we need friends the most.

Then I would definitely recommend moving somewhere where going out and meeting people is easy, whether it be hobbies, nightlife or other reasons to get together with new people and make friends. Definitely don’t buy a house somewhere where it takes a conscious input of energy from yourself to see others as when we become depressed that is the HARDEST time to get ourselves to push through inertia. If you are anything like me you are going to end up on your couch feeling sad and a lot of times you won’t push through that to drive the 30+ mins to whatever thing you were considering doing. You also can’t be anywhere near as spontaneous about interacting with people and participating in different community events when every time you do it requires specific planning. If you live in town all it might take for you to get involved in something happening you were unaware of or thought you weren’t interested in is to pass by it happening. When you live far away from things, you have to sit there on your couch and specifically make the decision while blobbing on your phone that you want to participate in whatever thing you are interested in, and that can be a lottttt harder when you are depressed, trust me lol.

If you want the feeling of being out in the sticks, pay attention to being close to mass transit or easy drives out into nature.

That must be nice

I strongly recommend getting a house where you can walk out your door and walk somewhere without feeling unsafe because the road immediately outside your house is dangerous if you aren’t in a car and have the destination you are walking be a pleasant environment to be a pedestrian (i.e. not endless stroads).

The impact on your health, especially if you can win the lottery and get a job within walking distance, cannot be measured easily and most people vastly underestimate the savings and quality of life impact from not having to drive everywhere for everything.

I really wish there was a way to quantify how dumb a country was in terms of its GDP (not the humans being physically less intelligent, just the culture is stupid even when there is abundant money to fund things) because it would be really fun to watch the US and UK keep fighting neck and neck to be in the lead.

It would be like following a sports rivalry between two unstoppable teams, except the unstoppable aspect is how much everything is stopping from falling apart for no good reason.

:)

You poor people need to get over yourselves and admit that the lines on the graph of economic factors that exclude poor people look good. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves, the fact that you aren’t happy about us making money is going to LOSE US THE ELECTION so get serious ok?

The other guy is worse, so we really don’t have to listen to a damn thing you say at all and you have to vote for our guy, get that through your poverty addled brains.

If regular non toxic alpha wannabes want to talk about an issue…there’s simply no place to do it because the feminists have driven those discussions to the dark dank corners of toxic hell holes of society.

Cite your sources if you want to make huge lazy generalizations that are honestly insulting to the immense amount of violence and structural exclusion women have faced down to get to the imperfect state of women’s equality.

Cite your sources it is a bunch of angry feminist activists shouting down men everywhere just trying to talk about why they are hurt.

Show me your sources, and a couple of anecdotes don’t count, show me evidence this is happening systematically.

edit love it, downvote me without giving any evidence that.

I’m not a Rogan meathead, but women are absolutely super choosey these days. Dating apps have given women an inflated sense of their own (dating) worth, and they largely want tall, handsome, well-off, slightly older men.

If this is happening even a little bit it is because of the distorting forces of capitalism and addictive phone apps are warping peoples interactions on dating apps.

I promise you, if you are genuinely a pretty nice human being who tries to be a good person there are plenty of women out there who want to fuck you. Really, the world is full of horny women who get hot and bothered by realizing that cute man they just met is also really sweet and kind. You don’t need fit any particular idea of a man, I understand it feels like you do and that is an awful feeling but it is a feeling not the reality.

Also women are probably more choosey because they are by large exhausted from work places that grind them down, trying to make rent, healthcare bullshit and any number of other struggles of modern life, just like you. They want to make sure that use their vanishing amount of free time, energy and money pursuing somebody that isn’t going to be a dead end.

If you want the quickest route to more men finding women who are interested in them, then support unionization, the social safety net, workers rights, and progressive legislation on housing. We need to take better care of people so that they have more free time, energy and money to pursue love and sex.

And modern feminism does imply that men can’t really talk about issues because that comes from a place of privilege.

I mean yeah there are shitty feminists like there are shitty types of all people but no most modern movements of feminism that are considered seriously by academics and people concerned with gender, sexuality and politics absolutely DO not imply men can’t talk about issues. Intersectional Feminism isn’t just about empowering women, it’s about creating structures that defend and empower everybody including women.

A feminist might be exhausted from toxic masculinity and the power imbalances of men vs women in society and in the moment not respond well to you bringing up issues with men, but feminists definitely by and large do care about men and the issues they face because at the end of the day they are just the flip side of the problems women face.

It’s all part of the same problem and the only way to fix it is to take better care of each other, which includes men, it includes everyone.

One of the reasons it is so hard is that right now is an extremely difficult time for people, so I think meeting people is even more difficult. If you are stressed out about making rent every month, guess what socialization and finding a partner becomes a distant priority vs just surviving.

I promise you though there are plenty of women out there who find social awkward people into niche hobbies sexy, especially if you are a genuinely nice person (which, beyond a superficial impression, is pretty much always the truly sexy thing about a person).

The problem is that those women are sitting at home exhausted and sad from modern life the same way you are, and it is hard to meet people outside the context of a bar.

If you are a nice person you are sexy and enough the way you are, what needs to change is the brutal grind of modern life, not you.

I mean just from a basic freetime calculation… women didn’t use to be able to work, which is fucked up, but it is also fucked up how much everybody’s lives are swallowed up by work at least in the US, and if you compare the difficulty of finding a women to hit it off with vs when women weren’t working as much…. I mean you have to cut yourself slack. The women of your dreams probably isn’t at the bar or wherever public meeting space you are, or actively on the dating app because they are stressed out and working all the time just like you :(

That insecurity is not inherent to straight men, but rather rampant among them

How brave of you to make the point “Not All Men!”

Why would we judge heterosexual masculinity by insecurity?

I don’t know, maybe because I am a heterosexual man and I have met countless heterosexual men and one of the most common threads that makes heterosexual men stand out from other people is their deeply ingrained insecurity and propensity to project it with regimes of control and violence?

And ok… to calm the all the men having temper tantrums I am not saying men are inherently…. well anything but is undeniable that the constructed male heterosexual identity is imbued with what I am describing. Our jobs as heterosexual men is to demolish that construction of violence that we were taught (which as you brought up, someone like Nick Offerman does effectively through characters), of course it isn’t inherent to “being a man” , unlike bigots I am not insulting the mental capacity of men by pretending like they don’t have a choice of how to behave, but rather pointing out that heteronormative masculinity is an extremely problematic construct that we must intentionally dismantle and rebuild in more healthy ways for everyone.

Part of doing that is taking the piss out of heterosexual men drowning in insecurity that they impose on everyone else through sexism, driving massive pickups that are custom designed to kill children in a car accident, mass shootings (~99% of mass shooters in the US are, surprise!, heterosexual white men!) talking over other people constantly, pretending the ideas put forward by women are theirs, desiring to possess a partner as an object not a human being with a brain, confusing displays of the capacity for violence as a display of a confidence in their masculinity, taking up as much space as possible in public, demanding to settle disputes with other men through violence and using the threat of that those men will no longer be real men if they refuse….

….how much do I have to go on?

By making fun of the worst aspects of heterosexual men like Donald Trump I am punching up at a thing that needs some punching I think. If this were punching down at a vulnerable group without power in the societies they inhabit ok that would be a different conversation than punching up at the category of people that controls almost every power structure and power dynamic in society wouldn’t it?

I mean, that is basically one of the key points Thomas Pynchon makes in Gravity’s Rainbow but with V2 rockets instead of nuclear weapons and yes absolutely I think it is a great point!

Do you not think the mass brutality of warfare is inextricably linked with societal constructions of male heterosexuality? Like… who else is doing the killing and driving all the violence then? Sure anybody can be a soldier, not just heterosexual men but come on…. are you going to claim with a straight face that there isn’t a connection between male heterosexuality and state violence? Lol I hope you do, that is an absurd position to take and I welcome the amusing rhetorical gymnastics you will have to display to make that kind of argument!

As long as we are arguing about the various reasons he is unfit to serve, and also being careful not to throw our trans friends under the bus in the process, I’m good!

Also Donald Trump is one of the straightest, most heterosexually normative men alive if we measure heterosexual masculinity in terms of insecurity, which I think is a reasonable way to quantify heterosexual masculinity. I mean, describing thermonuclear explosive yields of nuclear bombs in terms of kilotons of TNT is a reasonable way of talking about abstract regimes of force we can’t directly grasp, so why not kilotons of insecurity to describe the toxic yields of bigots?

edit gotta love the downvotes, I’m sorry if y’all can’t handle people punching up at heterosexual male identity, I know it is such a fragile thing and I am very sorry I should have been more careful not to break it :)

Not debating that certain types of recycling work, but if we don’t disconnect the word “recycling” from “wholesome and good!” we are going to keep hallucinating that we are in a far different problem than we are. so I am hesitant to start immediately listing all the types of recycling that do work when having a conversation about how recycling doesn’t work because that just reframes the conversation under terms of a status quo “recycling just needs to be reformed to work for more things!” fashion in the same way that “clean coal” is a purposeful dead end taken to postpone an upheaval of the status quo.

using a devastating neurological diseases as an insult, is wrong, but using it a a reason that he shouldn’t run a country is fair.

I don’t necessarily disagree but you also run the risk of distracting from the most dangerous part about him. He is a fascist, that is what is wildly dangerous about him and as much as it is fun to make fun of fascists for being dumbshits, it isn’t a lack of mental capacity that leads to fascism. Those two things are perpendicular and as tempting as it is to equate fascism with stupidity the far more terrifying truth is that it only really equates with ignorance.

If I was I sure as hell hope that an intersectional feminist would slap me upside the face and point out that it is impossible for a person who is trans to be the Queen Of England without being an extremely problematic figure from the perspective of LGTBQ+ people and people fighting colonialism in general (which includes feminism inherently hence the intersectionality).

They would also point out that just using “they” instead of “he or she” does no great injustice to people who identify as one of the two accepted status quo genders because it gets people to immediately retort that a heterosexual person in a position of power was not gendered immediately in discussion and instead referred to with the pronoun “they”, which naturally leads to an opportunity to point out how creepy the structure of the english language is with it’s obsession to immediately box people and identities into male or female.

As a final point I would like to point out that any given trans person who identifies as a Queen is automatically cooler than the Queen Of England. If the trans person can create dope ass baked goods they are automatically 2x as cooler. If they can skateboard too than the effect is exponential leading to a minimum 8x coolness multiplier.

we aren’t going to consume our way out of the climate catastrophe. I don’t blame people for thinking this, though. If you’ve lived your whole life under an economy and social order who’s keystone and ultimate guiding force is consumption, it’s easy to see consumption as your only recourse.

I don’t blame people either, I was raised in the same frame of reference that we have to consume our way out of this crisis and that the environmental crisis is fundamentally a story of our collective moral failings to be personally responsible.

People want to fix things, and I will be the last person to say that helping out a little bit doesn’t go a long way. It’s just, we need to evolve our understanding past framing the climate crisis as a story of our average people not having any personal responsibility to a frame of reference where we understand the class politics, the power of corporations to undermine environmentalism and the general collective solidarity between workers globally that will actually have the power to halt the climate crisis.