How am I romanticizing the stone ages? By pointing out that members of the tribe who acted selfishly were often executed (and sometimes tortured)? Is that idea a romantic one, in your mind?

Selfishness wasn’t so harshly punished back then because stone age people were noble savages, who were just more righteous than we are today. No, selfishness was so harshly and violently punished (even if the sentence was banishment, that was often a death sentence) because selfish people were a threat to the survival of the tribe, and thus a threat to the survival of every member of the tribe.

Capitalism is a system that rewards people for antisocial behavior. 20,000 years ago, people engaging in antisocial behavior would have been thrown out of the tribe (or executed) for their selfishness and greed, but today they rule.

We can try to use the power of the state to reign them in and keep them under control, but it’s a never-ending struggle. They will try to seize state control, to remove any systems that seek to moderate them. They believe that they are superior human beings, super human even. In their minds, their wealth proves their superiority. They have even convinced large numbers of us that they must be unrestricted, free to pursue maximum profits, otherwise modern civilization will collapse.

Maybe they’re right. Maybe capitalism can’t survive without sociopaths pursuing profits with relatively few restrictions. All the more reason to abolish capitalism, in my opinion, even if that means returning to a more communal existence.

I would definitely consider an electric truck. I’m especially intrigued by the Slate truck, but it seems like that’s still a few years from coming to market.

I don’t need another SUV, I need a small truck. My wife’s SUV has all the passenger space we need, I need something with a bed.

Colonialism is nothing to be proud of.

Yes, there are different sized trucks for different use cases. Yet, larger trucks became the norm and smaller trucks essentially disappeared. Did everyone start hauling more? Somehow I doubt it.

I have a big truck. I got it to haul our travel trailer, but we don’t have our trailer anymore. I would love to downsize but there aren’t a lot of options these days. I would love it if Chevy brought back the S-10. They stopped selling it 20 years ago, around the time everyone started to convince themselves that they needed a half ton or larger truck.

No one country should control the world’s reserve currency. There’s a reason Machiavellians want to capture the Federal government: it’s the most powerful government institution in the world. If you control the levers of the US Federal government, you control the world’s largest and most advanced army and the world’s reserve currency. I would certainly hope that any reasonable person would be able to see why that’s a huge problem.

And the meeting will look something like this

It’s tough because “the left” isn’t a monolith. There are people who are socially left but economically centrist. Similarly, there are people who are economically left but socially more conservative. Support for an economic system does not necessarily determine support for any one of various social causes.

I would argue that most “leftists” in the West are socially progressive liberals, who are perhaps critical of some aspects of neoliberal capitalism, but aren’t necessarily strongly committed to abolishing capitalism in favor of socialism or communism. In that regard, they are not economically left, or only slightly economically left. A lot of Western leftists are far more focused on addressing social justice issues within capitalism rather than completely changing the system.

There just isn’t one, singular “left.” I think there is a very vocal social justice movement in the West and that is what most of us think of when we think of the left, but that group does not have exclusive ownership of all leftist thoughts and ideas, even if they might think they do and even if they try to police the views of other leftists who might but necessarily agree with them on every issue.

The US is Israel’s sole benefactor, and as such Netanyahu has a strong incentive to influence US politics to support the Zionist cause.

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I’m sure these neoliberals wish they could just do what they did in Chile in the early 1970s: overthrow a democracy and replace it with a neoliberal dictatorship.

Admittedly, they don’t necessarily want a permanent dictatorship, it’s more a means to achieve their final goal, which is a neoliberal technocracy. They believe that neoliberalism has been proven to be the best socioeconomic system - the culmination of, and end of, all human history - and that if we can just get the right technocrats in power they can tweak and adjust things just right so as to get neoliberal capitalism back on track. It is, after all, the last and only system human beings will ever need (according to them).

He probably wants to force them to sell the team back to Dan Snyder, too. Trump and Snyder do seem to be men cut from the same cloth.

I rarely cry. I didn’t even cry all that much when my dad died a few years ago, but I’ve been doing it more and more since. Maybe I needed some time for my emotions to loosen from their moorings. Odd things can set me off now. I bawled like a baby during Guardians of the Galaxy 3. I was alone, though. Had my wife or someone else been there, I probably would’ve just sucked it up and pushed it down.

Is it the one with the Mangione Enterprise heir with an ivy league education?

Yes, it is. Because he gave up all of that to take a stand.

I hate this country so fucking much.

Which society? There are many societies on the Earth today, and I predict that some of them will experience relative peace, security and prosperity, while others will experience conflict and instability.

Yeah, I mean, duh. Of course it’s too late to STOP climate change (barring some miraculous discovery). That’s been true for some time. The globe will continue to warm and the climate will continue to change, rapidly. However, it is not yet determined how much the globe will warm, how much the climate will change nor how rapidly.

According to Climate Action Center, the most likely future emissions scenarios will result in warming of between 1.9C and 2.7C by the end of the century. The climate models aren’t high enough resolution to project the next 75 years of every community on the planet, under each emissions scenario. We don’t know how warm it’s going to get or how much the climate will change, so we don’t know which societies will collapse or exactly how many people will die in any conflicts that might start as a result of climate migration or disputes over land and resources, etc. We just don’t know. We don’t know what’s over and what isn’t.

It’s looking like we’re going to land somewhere between generally pretty bad but manageable to the collapse of all civilization. No one knows. I have a feeling we won’t know for sure it’s over until after it’s well and truly over.

I was born and raised here in the United States, just like my father, and his father, and so on for several generations. You fuck off. You and your disgusting fucking federal government. May you all rot in hell.