I prefer to think of myself as an Epsilon Male.

As in, “Y the fuck are you like this, bro?”

No cummie

No talkie

I’m voting for him as an avowed leftist.

Besides impeding fascism, his reforms on student loans mean I’ll be debt-free with $0 payments in 10 years. That is a material improvement of my life that I am infinitely grateful for.

But I still think he’s a piece of shit for aiding and abetting a genocide and would vote for another candidate if I meaningfully could.

Politics is nuanced. 🤷

The disease is unlimited money in politics.

There are billionaires who were already radicalized to this level. They’re just pouring their fortunes into bringing everyone else into their fold, too.

Remember 15 years ago when Republicans finally stopped going after LGBTQ folks, and how that slowly started to erode after Citizens United? It is not coincidental. There are evangelist billionaires whose only concern in the world is a regressive future, and that’s bad for everybody.

I live in Taiwan.

Can confirm that plenty of shit is slathered in cheese and/or mayo, milk is readily available at any store, there’s an absurd amount of Häagen-Dazs, and milk tea is the most commonly purchased beverage in the whole country.

Butter can be a bit scarce, though, strangely.

I dunno about you, my dude, but the only people I’ve seen fucked up by antifascists were not saying that they didn’t want to bake a gay cake.

But I’ve seen the people who didn’t want to bake a gay cake be called pieces of shit who should do better. And I think that’s just called social consequences.

This is where I tend to disagree with Marx as well.

Capital is a fantastic book full of scathing and prophetic analyses of capitalism and its innate degradation of value and connection.

The Communist Manifesto is a book with some good ideas but some implementation that I find flawed. And that’s not a knock on Marx-- critiquing problems is a significantly easier prospect than offering solutions.

But a lot of Marx’s proposals for the implementation of Communism are rooted in authoritarianism, even if their end goal is the dissolution of the state and capital. Also, for an ideology versed in the formation and interdependence of worker communities, the Day of the Rope is kind of antithetical to establishing solidarity and mostly serves, I believe, as masturbatory schadenfreude.

But hey, I’m willing to fix some of the stuff that doesn’t work instead of throwing more fuel into the machine that over-harvests people and our planet to the point of destruction.

I really like this nuanced take, btw. Thanks for posting it.

The Wheels On the Bus on loop and full blast is part of my shock and awe strategy.

I now live in a climate with HUGE roaches.

I grew up in a climate where they were rare. I never saw a roach in-person until I was in my 20s.

For the first year in my current apartment, it was rare for me to see a roach. Maybe an odd one every once in a while.

Now, I get multiple every time it rains. Which sucks on its own. But, they’ve all taken to the same habit of crawling up the back of my couch and staring at me 3 inches away from my face to say hello.

When this happens, I transcend beyond fear and anger and enter a blackout rampage mode. Move all my furniture. Couch cushions. Hunting until I’m absolutely certain that every single one of them is dead.

I’ve bought drain covers. I’ve bought roach traps. I’ve cleaned my house top-to-bottom. I’ve checked the seals on my door and windows. They’re nowhere in sight on a dry day, but every time it rains, they’re fucking back.

It’s genuinely starting to fuck with my head, because whenever I see peripheral movement out of the corner of my eye in my apartment, I think it’s a roach. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Are those a pair of little antennae poking out from behind my couch, or am I imagining it? I don’t know until I’ve done yet another sweep.

It’s harder to fall asleep. I keep having brief bouts of imagination wbere bugs are crawling and swarming all over me. I constantly do visual sweeps of my apartment. I can feel my stress level rising on rainy days. I feel like I’m losing my mind.

I fucking hate roaches.

Fart.