hexbear.net/c/relationships

The immiserated, exploited labor aristocracy who dream about living like nobles are forced by the dictates of the market to live in these bedroom communities and drive 50km+ for a commute.

These are the majority of people, they’ll never give it up voluntarily because that would be idealism, and the menbership in our communist parties needs to reach 20% of the population of our society before we can push the Revolution button to change it all at once at the federal level.

That’s just how materialism works sweaty

Maybe the line was attached to the cork and the tension in the line was the only thing keeping the strait unplugged

Another factor is simply sticking around long enough until they have the seniority to be promoted. The motivated people look elsewhere; the mediocre people settle for what they’ve got and slowly advance inside companies.

It’s a mechanism of the Peter Principle.

There is a big difference between an individual giving orders (and having the power to) in a tense moment, and an individual being the one who gives orders about everything all the time.

The ones who arrange the battles and the ones who arrange the councils are not the same, nor should they be. That equivalence is a flaw of Western civilization going back to classical Greece or even earlier.

The stance I’ve arrived at is that hierarchy in a broad sense isn’t bad, but rolling all of the powers into the same hierarchy is.

No one is going to be the best or the most insightful or most apt at everything. Also, spreading out parts of the roles not only allows more people to distinguish themselves, it makes transfer of power easier and reduces your vulnerability to decapitation approaches.

Someone’s going to be the breaking wave crest, but we can still all be water.

We were sorting through Simpsons flavor toothpaste at work yesterday.

I bet it tastes exactly like a Simpson. Ah, the wonders of modern chemistry.

Every eyebrow hair is sacred, whenever a woman removes one by waxing it, he adopts it.

Former abused kids will instantly recognize the semantic arrangement of the original quote, where the powerful are portrayed as an automaton or force of nature instead of something with agency.

It’s more accurate to say that they’re afraid of doing things any differently.

To admit that you’ve been going down the wrong path means giving up on a large part of your life that you’ve invested in. And on a deep level, the investment outweighs the disaffection.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/05/us/cia-world-factbook-countries-cec

There was a guy who archived the latest version, but the only good thing the CIA ever did has been discontinued.

Styrofoam in packaging. Most of it has been replaced by plastic pillows, and good riddance.

“Low-fat” as a selling point. That crammed so much sugar and artificial flavors into food. Yes, we now have the “no seed oil” craze and protein everything, but this doesn’t seem quite as bad.
Also more generally, the sense that you were weird if you cared about the ingredients on the label.

The stigma against playing games as an adult. Everyone plays games now, even people who grew up before the NES. Even though along with this comes lots more gambling; the arcades are gone but slot machines are all over and online gambling is huge.

Overt homophobia is on its way out. It used to be all over the place, and also used as a cudgel against anyone who wasn’t normative enough. This seemed to change about when people who were out passed the 5% mark. Even the reactionaries understand that people with same-sex attractions are a large part of their base and society at large, and they either bear with it or hamper their own growth and viability.

As a matter of personal taste, I really don’t miss the period when an overwhelming plurality of men had the same gel-heavy hairstyle. Nowadays I can use this as a red flag when I see it.

If electric vehicles come dominate the market in the next decade, I won’t miss all the things that come with internal combustion engines: revving engines just to make noise, rolling coal, oil stains and spills all over parking lots, making a big deal out of driving a manual transmission.

A psyop to enable another psyop.

We can get everybody to watch lots of movies that are vetted by the DoD, but first everybody has to be open to comics.

They shut down the Factbook a month ago though.

they’re living out my dreams fr

And yet, there are so many places that will terminate you after missing as little as 2 days/shifts unaccounted for.

Maybe it’s the churn strategy they use for their labor force.

I think it dates back to the 2020 primary campaign where she ran as a spoiler for the left. She rushed to be the first to declare candidacy, she tried to accuse Bernie Sanders* of defaming her and to cause a rift between her campaign and his, she stayed in the race when everyone else was dropping out, which was clearly a collusion to peel off voter share from Bernie while everyone else was endorsing Biden.

*Who then proceeded to not run in 2024, take a whole bunch of compromised positions especially on the first year of the Gaza extermination campaign, and do a few nothingburger “fighting oligarchy” rallies and tours that don’t even attempt to leverage any power.

There are plenty more examples of Warren being disingenuous and flimsy on progressive positions. On consumer protections and anti-monopoly stances she’s pretty good, but doesn’t amount to more than a machine politician outside of that.

If someone is going to be a successful progressive politician, they’d better take principled socialist stances, stick to them, and fight for them. Otherwise we just get an endless string of Obamas who defise radical movements, triangulate with the Republicans, and eventually their entire legacy is overturned by the next Republican administration.

This is how “ratchet politics” works.

It seems like the default UI text, before the script loads and overrides it into English, has changed from Chinese to Russian.

And if those fries all taste like moss
Everything’ll come with some dipping sauce