the way liberalism aligned people seem to think that capitalists do nothing to influence global economic system and just sit on their wealth exposes their inherent belief in capitalism being the natural way of life. when it’s nothing but! capitalists put lots of work and money in constantly reanimating the corpse of capital. they commit tremendous atrocities as blood sacrifices to keep capitalism alive! there’s nothing passive about capitalist’s existence as class!
tbh something i never hear anyone talk about re: homelessness is the common practice of police charging regular bribes out of tent campers under the threat of small-scale sweeps
in practice, you have to pay rent to fascist militiamen with no legal claim over the land you’re squatting on to be homeless in america. every time a small encampment gets swept or a tent gets burned down it’s more likely than not because of some dirty cop trying to squeeze more blood from a stone. civil society sanctifies this by making encampment a crime. the law follows & enables the extortion rather than producing it as an externality - technically federal land doesn’t have any terribly solid anti-encampment laws but the cops will still harass you for money there
i live in an area with a large homeless population and the number of times my neighborhood, in which there was last a shooting afaik more than a year ago, gets buzzed by helicopters is NUTS. It’s 100% an intimidation tactic and it has a specific set of targets
people mostly ignore all this. They ignore the cops circling in the sky, they ignore a tent or broken-down RV being in a vacant lot one day and a burned-out shell being there the next. Society’s hands are not clean here, and in any other society we’d consider this corruption on a tremendous scale. But it’s America so it doesn’t count
new thing i learned just now: in like 400 AD there was a monk named simeon stylites who used to live in a one room cell with a window but too many people kept bugging him for religious advice, so he climbed to the top of a pillar and shackled himself to it until he died 37 years later.
this became a cool new trend to the point where there were enough pillar monks of varying viewpoints that they would scream at each other all day
“humans don’t do anything for free” somewhere out there there is a guy who spent days if not weeks of his life cataloguing every stupid thing you can do on stardew valley so that you can minmax the fuck out of growing potatoes on a pixel grid for quite literally no reason but that it might help someone else
No no, I know the Yokut have been living here for literally thousands of years, making their dwellings out of cheap, readily available, local materials like adobe bricks, I know homes constructed this way actually stay comfortable and cool in the blazing desert heat, but also absorb that same heat for the freezing desert nights.
But, hear me out, let’s import lumber from south fucking America so we can build huge insulated timber lattices divided by pockets of air and insulated drywall, the goal being to turn every non-ground-floor space into a sort of geomantic air fryer that is actively hotter than standing outside in the Mojave fucking desert.
Lenticular clouds over Mount Fuji, Japan. These are stationary lens-shaped clouds that form at high altitudes, usually perpendicular to the direction of the wind.
ALT
ALT
