This is funny but I’m surprised Mint is at the bottom.

I guess I shouldn’t be. I didn’t really notice how popular it’s gotten. I’m used to thinking of it as a cooler Ubuntu.

Can you imagine how bland the average an American wedding must look to them?

The size of families and the expectation of who gets invited varies a lot by culture, too.

Irish weddings are often big. Same for Mexican weddings, a lot of Arab folks.

I suspect Protestant Americans are outliers globally in the size of the average family and the degree of contact people maintain with cousins.

The difference is between doing it secretly or in the open.

I assume I’m monitored on my work computer, but me and my company both know they aren’t supposed to.

When they admit it and make you look them in the eye and consent to it, that’s when the social contract unravels in a big way.

There’s a line from a great comedy in which an oligarch is berating his son for playing elaborate games to ruin the life of a schlub who once disrespected him, right after we see the oligarch at a party where people are shitting on glass coffee tables with prostitutes under them. The son says, “How is it any different from what you do?!?” And the dad says, in a posh Oxford accent, “The glass, son. The glass.”

I think figuring out how to find solidarity across the working class is a guidepost to revolution.

It’s more than okay to admit that it’s challenging. Anything else is just untrue.

I do think the effort is worth it. I think uniting for a better world is the prize we win when we figure out how to construct a society that accommodates as much diversity of thought and lifestyle as our civilization contains.

Peter Frase wrote an article (and soon after a book expansion of it) called “Four Futures” in which he examines this question.

According to Frase, the future we wind up with can be categorized into a Punnett square based on two questions: will essentials be abundant or scarce? And will they be distributed selfishly or universally?

If we have more than we need and we give it away universally, that’s Communism. If we have less than we need, but we share what we have and our burdens equally, that’s Socialism.

Now here’s the two you’re asking about. If we don’t have a populist revolution, we wind up with one of the bad ones.

If we have abundance, but it’s hoarded, we get Rentism. You can see outlines of this already. It’s where you pay for digital files that can be endlessly reproduced and are forced into subscriptions to continue using appliances despite the fact that their continued use is free to the company. This is the one you’re asking about. If we reached full automation, but still charged people for everything, you’d have a version of serfdom, likely with a basic income. The income would likely be based on a social credit system in which people who show the most obedience are rewarded with money to buy things that are basically free to produce. There might be a system of artificial scarcity to force people to devote a certain number of hours each day to unnecessary work or watching advertisements to receive income.

The last one is called Exterminism. You can read about it in the article. It’s pretty self-explanatory.

Poe slaw

This is what I came to say.

I think because of the comedy it often gets overlooked as a genuine Star Trek show. And that’s a mistake.

Hard disagree.

The characters and stories stand on their own. The jokes are great too, but ultimately, I care about the characters and their journeys as much as I cared about the TNG Enterprise crew.

It’s got real heart.

I won’t argue that both have released some superfluous cash-in content, but can you really say that they’ve enshitified when we also get stuff like Lower Decks and Andor?

Both have produced mixed content, but they’ve also each released some of their best entries during the last five years.

There is actually a popular book that answers this kind of question: “The Dictator’s Handbook: Why Bad Behavior is Almost Always Good Politics”

I haven’t read it, but from summaries, my understanding is that the answer to your question is that every high ranking office depends on maintaining support from other people with power. Even if we disregard voters, Trump (and other presidents) need to keep generals, oligarchs, and senators happy, or they can remove him from power. Naked disrespect for the rabble displeases these people, because they’re still sensitive to assassinations, market disruptions, challenges from other power centers like state governments, etc.

Perhaps I didn’t communicate this well, but that was kind of central to my point: the work they did has grown enough beyond their initial writings that we don’t really need to fixate so much on the original texts.

For instance, I really liked China Mieville’s “A Specter, Haunting”. He kind of summarized The Communist Manifesto, and I thought it was more readable than the original. It was easier for me to engage with, and he placed it in modern context.

To put my point another way, I think we should focus more on the ideas rather than the thinkers.

I want to clarify my point. I’m definitely not dismissing the importance of these figures or the value of reading them.

What I’m saying is that I think people put too much emphasis on what their opinions were rather than just learning from their ideas and synthesizing them with the ideas of their contemporaries and intellectual progenitors.

To go back to my example, there’s a meme among creationists that Charles Darwin recanted his theory of evolution on his deathbed. It’s baseless, but more importantly it’s irrelevant. The value of his ideas are not dependent on what he believed. He’s notable because he contributed to a framework on which we hang a larger understanding.

Similarly, I think Marx et. al. contributed ideas that are still very useful to our collective discourse. But their opinions are not prophesy, and I think people should focus more on the collective wisdom of the fields that they birthed rather than the specific opinions they personally held.

Frankly, I feel like I’m alone in this take, but I think people shouldn’t spend so much attention basing their politics primarily on references to philosophers who died more than a century prior.

These are important figures for historical study, but we don’t base our modern understanding about genetics on the work of Darwin and Mendel: we base these on the work of Watson, and Crick, and Franklin, and Margulis, and Sanger, and hundreds (or thousands) of people who carried the work forward since.

We still teach starting with the early folks to give context. But they aren’t the basis for our beliefs.

This goes for Marxists AND anarchists (and everyone else): sell your ideas in the modern age.

While I love Superman TV shows I am declining to spend the calories necessary to tell you if an AI fanfic you don’t like accurately represents Clark Kent’s personality.

I will, however, tell you that if you’re letting an AI fan fic live rent-free in your head, you’re got a mind virus. I advise that you cease consumption of AI fanfic crossovers that you disagree with immediately. I recommend giving yourself an orgasm to reset your hormones and then going to your nearest library and browsing their comics section until dinner time. You’re welcome.

What’s LMBO?

Again, I don’t want this to be a fight, but this isn’t really true. Again, our media presents a certain picture of boomers that isn’t actually reflective of what the average boomer looks like.

Most boomers aren’t country club Republicans. In 2024, most baby boomers did not vote for Donald Trump.

In 2025, about 37% of baby boomers voted Republican. Just like most years.

You read that right: 25% didn’t vote, and of those who did, Trump won 49%. That was enough to win.

Maybe you’re asking, though, 'Why didn’t they vote Democrat more! They should’ve elected Gore! And lots of Democratic congresspersons and senators! To which I would say that we live in a very damaged democracy in which the Democratic party has been running on most of the same economic policies as Republicans since the 1970s. Most boomers didn’t have a say.

Most boomers are poor and have been fucked over by the government just like the rest of us.

The 1% (regardless of any age) are the bad guys.

Respectfully, whenever I hear this I have to push back.

‘The boomers fucked us over’ trope is largely a myth like ‘first world consumers are responsible for climate change’: it’s a cultural narrative that exists to divert blame to a huge group to obscure that it’s mostly a small group of investors and their corporations who (in both of these cases) fucked over the other 99% of the civilisation.

It’s true that most of the worst people are boomers: but as a group, most boomers are not these people. Most boomers are poor and have lived their whole lives in a fake democracy where they never really had serious political power.

The elderly greeters at Walmart who can never retire; the old woman at the bus stop wearing chipped glasses with a prescription 10 years out of date; the guy at the VA home dying of cancer he got from being drafted into Vietnam; these aren’t the people who fucked the rest of us over. They’re just us, older.

I’m curious what people make of the broader allegations of a history of child endangerment and irresponsible behavior with kids beyond the lurid sexual accusations.

For instance, do you consider the claims that he held his new born over the railing of a balcony credible? Is that part of a broader rumor mill? What do you make of that?

I’m saying that considering the availability of credible accusors, I think you’re defining who counts as a credible accusors in a selective way to maintain your prior assumptions.

I’m not saying this to be snide or disrespectful. I’m just asking if it’s possible you’re letting a bias go unnoticed.