“She’s a movie star” yeah, we know. Lesbian stuff, right? How do you think Jeffrey found her for his boy Donny?

I certainly wasn’t saying that it isn’t a good option for some/most. It definitely can be. I’m saying that “just move” misses a lot of nuance, hurdles, pitfalls, and priorities. Like you said, you nearly ended up homeless. Even though you made it in the end, you were lucky you didn’t get stuck in that situation too.

And that advice ignores the runaway problems that causes the affordability crisis in the first place, the same problems that are going to happen in places that are currently more affordable too. It is a short term solution for yourself to move. But when those problems catch up to you or your kids later, where are they going to go then? How long can the goal post keep moving before we stop it?

Yeah there is also the consideration that many that live in metro areas get by without a car, and are less likely to own a car or even have a driver’s license. Without reliable or even existent public transport in their new home, where a car is a basic necessity, that is another massive financial hurdle and even a skill/paperwork hurdle to make living there viable.

For context, he was speaking about living in expensive metropolitan cities, suggesting people move into less expensive places within the US, like the interior states. Ben says enough stupid shit to mock without isolating a quote from context to make it seem like he said/meant something else entirely.

Hell, there’s plenty to push back on with this quote and argument even understanding what he actually meant. “Just move somewhere cheaper”. Like that’s a much easier thing to say than do.

1. If you’re unable to afford living where you are, then you’re probably going to struggle to afford the costs of moving. Then there’s the logistics of finding work and housing wherever you move to from another state. If you don’t have money to coast on for temporary housing, gas and food, you either need a company willing to hire you and provide you assistance to move or a personal connection in the area that’ll let you crash on their couch.

2. Your field of work may just not exist in Guthrie, Oklahoma, or wherever. Leaving metro areas may mean changing careers. And those careers may not pay anywhere near as much either. Your costs may go down, but your wages might go with it.

3. Leaving your home city means leaving all of your support structures. Your parents, siblings, friends, peers, etc. Some people may really depend on those. Or maybe someone depends on you specifically. Maybe your mom isn’t healthy? Maybe you have a sister dealing with addiction? Maybe they need your presence to ensure their care.

4. There are political, legal, and health considerations in changing states. Do you have an active sex life and don’t want to be afraid that you’ll die from an unaborted ectopic pregnancy? Have a trans child? Are you not white? Then you may be more limited in suitable places to live outside of metropolitan city.

5. This sidesteps the actual problem here, the why of it all. Why they can’t afford to live in the city they grew up in. Why is pay so bad? Why is housing so expensive? Why are groceries so expensive? But no, no. We can’t question or address those things. That’s just business baby. Free market capitalism at work. Let it ride, unregulated. Just move your ass out of the way to Hastings, Nebraska or some shit.

So the valid observation is this: Countries started using green energy as a supplement and replacement to fossil fuels, and as fossil fuels are being phased out for any number of good reasons, those counties also started moving away from fossil fuel collection and stockpiling. But because they weren’t yet entirely free of the need for fossil fuels yet, cutting off those fuels left them with an energy deficit.

The bad take: The move towards green energy made the western world vulnerable to an energy crisis, so we should go back to funding the fossil fuels industry as soon as possible.

The correct take: The continued reliance on fossil fuels made the western world vulnerable to an energy crisis, so we should rid ourselves of that reliance as soon as possible.

A country that runs entirely on non-fossil fuel energy, on solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, even nuclear, doesn’t have to worry if the flow of oil is open or not. Ever. Your infrastructure would have to be attacked directly (like the war crime Trump threatened) to cut you off at that point. That’s about as invulnerable as you could hope for.

If you are in a comparative religions class or an ancient literature/mythology class and also reading passages from the Torah, Quran, Toa Te Ching, Bhagavad Gita, the teachings of Buddha, etc. for comparison, by all means, read the Bible. If you are just reading the Bible under a pretense to push Christianity onto students, push the law to its bounds and normalize indoctrination (and we know you are), then fuck all the way off.

You’re not the first, and you weren’t the last.

Are the flights backed up to, or are they just leaving half empty all the time?

Thufir wore it better.

Tom and I go way back. He’s never so much as given you that over the shoulder smile.

Then come the “saviors” of the internet that blame it on illegal aliens, women having rights etc because according to their logic we had it good in the 70s so we must reverse everything back to the way it was in 70s.

The problem isnt just the “saviors” and their message. Those people have always existed, always had the same blaming strategy. The problem is that the internet has made it easier for those messages to reach a global audience, has made the messenger faceless and unaccountable and given the presumption of legitimacy, has made it easier to get absorbed into isolated communities saturated in this kind of messaging, and made it easier to warp the worldview of the community to something antithetical to reality. If you run into a dude saying wacky shit in a bar, and he just seems to be some drunk asshole, you’re not likely to give him much credence against all of the other messaging around you. But if you find an entire community saying the things he says, and they welcome you in, and you get a sense of comradery and purpose from it, that same messaging holds a lot of sway over you.

Isolation has always been the secret sauce to radicalization. Exposure is the antidote. Humans have always had cultural feedback loops that reinforce a specific worldview. And meeting with other cultures often causes conflicts when those worldview collide. The promise of the internet was a more global culture wherein we have a shared reinforced world view. But that didn’t really happen for everyone. What we are seeing now is that same feedback loop phenomenon in a digital space, but often with dramatically different worldviews, even within the same local physical space. That still causes conflict when those communities collide, both online and in the real world, but now that conflict happens everywhere, even in your own household sometimes.

We’re losing physical communities, friends and family for our online echo chamber communities. People are definitely driven more into those digital communities as their physical life is more of a struggle financially, socially, etc. Relieving those struggles would certainly go a long way in remediating the problem, but it won’t go away.

The older I get, the more I think that the internet was a mistake. It had a lot of potential for good and has delivered on that in many ways, but it has also unleashed an uncontrollable onslaught of radicalization, hatred, isolation, and mental illness. It’s harms have outweighed the good by orders of magnitude.

Didn’t he already do that before? Am I imagining that?

Taking off dress shoes

There is nothing to celebrate here, and I’m not suggesting there is. This legal blatant gerrymandering bullshit is a net loss for this country and our democracy. I will always advocate against the practice. However, that is not on California, and I don’t think they’re wrong to do it in response to Texas and other states. It is a necessary evil, one that they were forced to make by fascists. The alternative is to cede even more power to the fascists until it goes too far to take it back.

I don’t want to kill a person and I certainly would never celebrate doing so. But if there were a gun to my head, or my daughter’s, if they were to try to take away my family, our freedom… I wouldn’t hesitate, and I would be right for it. I don’t think California has anything to apologize for, even if it is a sad outcome overall.

Well that is a bad, hopefully disingenuous take. The goal in California was not to move the needle with corruption and perversion of democracy. It was to prevent the needle from moving with corruption and perversion of democracy (by the Trump Administration and other corrupt GOP governors and legislatures), which, unfortunately required the same perversion to accomplish. It never should have been necessary or allowed for EITHER party to do this to ANY state. It’s fucked up that it is or ever was allowed, and needs to be fixed as soon as humanly possible. But under those circumstances to not respond to your corrupt counterpart pulling the needle their way by pulling it back yourself is to allow the corruption to overwhelm everyone and everything. It’s self-defense. The moral highground that results in boots on your neck is not a path forward.

“Everybody knows […]” means my parent(s) had some weird or strict rules and life lessons that I had hounded into me which I internalized into my very being and never questioned, and now I have unspoken and often unrealistic expectations of people and the world that no one has absolutely any reason to know about.

He forgot the rules of fantasy names. You can add “-onious”, “-ainous”… or “-anus” to just about anything and it becomes magical. Should’ve gone with Wambsgonious instead.

Nope. Look again. Multiple parallel red and white stripes.

Slight tangent. They also appear to be using an American flag as a tablecloth, and someone has their bare feet up on it. Makes sense that so in and related to this administration appear to be involved here.