• 153 Posts
  • 10.8K Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 14th, 2023

help-circle







  • Both can bring out social anxiety

    Generally speaking, socialization is like a muscle. You have to use it to build it. Which is why we have schools introduce people to social settings in controlled settings and with incrementally more difficulty.

    “Nobody should ever have to interact with more than a handful of other people at a time” is a recipe for building a population of socially anxious people.

    When you cloister kids at a young age, then introduce them to a big school full of more advanced students, you’re throwing them into the deep end of the pool late in the game. But just insisting “they’re 11 years old! they’ll never be social! lost cause!” is infinitely more cruel than weening them into society as best as your system can.









  • And decoupling only started to really happen last year.

    We began decoupling when we took a militant policy against immigration. You can take that back to Clinton in the 90s or all the way back to Eisenhower in the 50s. But we’ve been adopting strains of isolationism straight back to the final days of WW2.

    You could describe the Cold War as an enormous globalized decoupling event, which we tentatively recoiled from a few times before collapsing back into it.


  • Authoritarianism is spreading like wildfire

    The entrenched neoliberal post-Cold War consensus is cracking up.

    But anyone who told you that the Reagan Era global order wasn’t authoritarian sold you a box of rocks.

    Upper middle class Americans are getting a taste of life outside the bubble. This is what “democracy” has felt like in The Philippines and Brazil and Ferguson, MO for some time.

    They are using their essentially bottomless pit of money, influence, and resources to shape a world where they are permanently definitively on top.

    When were they not? Do you think the folks fucking kids on Epstein’s Island twenty years ago weren’t doing the exact same thing?

    When you snip away the social safety net, drop the illusions of “friendly neighborhood police officer”, and abandon any effort at mitigating the ecological consequences of capitalist expansion, this is what you get.


  • assigns them a score if a citizen walks on the sidewalk correctly

    Funny story about Jaywalking

    The automobile lobby in the US took up the cause of labeling and scorning jaywalkers in the 1910s and early 1920s. In 1912, for instance, Popular Mechanics magazine reported that the term was current in Kansas City: “The city pedestrian who cares not for traffic regulations at street corners, but strays all over the street, crossing in the middle of the block, or attempting to save time by choosing a diagonal route across a street intersection instead of adhering to the regular crossing, is designated as a ‘jay walker,’ in Kansas City.”

    In 1915, when New York City’s police commissioner Arthur Woods sought to apply the word “jaywalker” to anyone who crossed the street at mid-block, the New York Times protested, calling it “highly opprobrious” and “a truly shocking name.”

    Originally in the US, the legal rule was that “all persons have an equal right in the highway, and that in exercising the right each shall take due care not to injure other users of the way”. In time, however, streets became the province of vehicular traffic, both practically and legally.

    Anyway, enjoy your hyper-criminalized car culture hellscape while making spooky fingers about Evil Foreign Country.


  • You were not born when the decoupling began. You will not live to see it end.

    I suppose the plan was to decouple the world from the dollar all the time.

    I mean, depends on who you ask. But there’s definitely been a deliberately effort from within the Silicon Valley wing of the economy to force people into using Cryptocurrency as a legally-compulsory dollar alternative.