I absolutely have been on EBT, so take your sanctimonious bullshit somewhere else.

About 80 cents of every dollar in SNAP benefits is used to purchase staples like meat, bread, milk, cereal, and rice. The rest goes to salty snacks, candy, and sweetened beverages, according to the Brookings Institution.

I love how you think you know everything about me though. Have any other strawmen you want to set up?

Because it’s paternalistic nonsense.

The vast majority of EBT is spent on staples. The poors don’t need you telling them what to buy or not.

Trump should resign because he has ties to Epstein.

“Ancien regime? More like anci-yawn regime.”

You’d certainly enjoy The Dawn of Everything then. The authors do make some cheeky academic jokes about parts of Diamond’s work that they disagree with, but they also point out where they think he was right.

I just finished The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow, and it’s a remarkable look at state formation, prehistoric societies, the process by which cultures differentiate from each other and form their identities, the origins of farming and why it was (or wasn’t) adopted around the world, and so much more.

If you have even a passing interest in prehistory, it’s a must-read

Walmart is among those massive corporations who don’t pay their workers enough and rely on these benefits to make up what should be paid in wages.

They know the money is coming right back to them; they love the situation.

It’s not about “promoting healthy eating.” It’s about shitting on the poors.

Republicans just love acting sanctimoniously, and this lets them judge people for occasionally treating themselves to something other than the gruel that their station deserves.

It’s fucking embarrassing that they spent time and money to pass this just because Republicans are so offended that a dirty poor might buy a candy bar for their daughter’s birthday.

The thing is: access to abortion is literally a family value. The right to reproductive freedom means that a person has a choice if they want to risk a dangerous pregnancy that could leave the family without a caretaker.

Exactly this.

Conservatives believe that they should get special rights simply because of who they are. This isn’t grounded in a shared moral system; conservative values are about elevating the “right” people to power and privilege.

It’s why conservatives don’t care what the people who represent them do: they believe that their representative deserves to be there simply because they’ve signalled that they’re culturally conservative.

It’s an ideology for losers, and I mean that literally. The “left” side of the political spectrum is about empowering those who never had much to lose, while the “right” side is about reclaiming lost privileges for those who feel entitled to the whole pie.

The right isn’t really against abortion even if they pretend to be; they’re against it for the people who they want to control.

Even independent of accusations made by his daughter and ex-wife

How gross is it that I can’t tell if you’re referring to two different people or not?

Cool story. You’re probably right that a debunked prehistory that ignores the past 40 years of research is more accurate.

Knowing things is for chumps anyway.

We’ve been sacrificing people to supply-side Jesus for a good long while.

Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, at least make a buck from it.

Yeah, I think there’s a distinction between the “intellectuals” and the rank-and-file idiots.

Shapiro once insisted that his wife told him vaginas should be bone-dry to win an argument, so I think you’re right there.

It’s hard to know if the dipshits who say this are really that stupid or if they’re ideological zombies just saying what they think will win an argument in the moment.

But I think it’s both.

My kids were just telling me the other day that they can’t understand why their friends think it’s weird since it’s delicious.

I think a lot of the haters just haven’t tried it. It’s a super easy, high protein breakfast.

This view of prehistory is rooted in the Enlightenment-era philosophers, and does not really reflect what we’ve discovered archaeologically.

For example, the protocity of Çatalhöyük (c. 7000 BCE) was settled in a river valley, and populated by an egalitarian people who hunted and gathered while also using the natural flood cycle of the river to do much of their agricultural work for them. As far as we can tell, this settlement (about a thousand people) had no kings or rulers; no special buildings like temples or palaces for the thousands of years that it was inhabited.

There have been countless societies that made efforts to decentralize power, to “trap” would-be rulers in chiefdoms where their power is limited to how persuasive they can be or how much of their material wealth they can give away.

The Iroquois Confederacy was a matriarchal political system set up to disperse power from clan mothers down to various leaders and settle disputes through debate.

The reason the world is locked into the “strong man” era is that we’ve had our most basic human freedoms stripped away: the freedom to move away from a bad situation is our most fundamental right from which all of our others derive. The modern state restricts this, which limits our second fundamental human right: the right to say “no” to authority. And then, once the state has ability to control you with violence, we lose our last fundamental freedom: the right to remake our political systems.

It didn’t have to be this way; there’s nothing intrinsic about people that makes us want to be controlled. In fact, when we talk to and read writings from people who have always had these fundamental freedoms, they think our way of doing things is madness. Yes, there have likely always been raiders and bandits; but there has also always been an egalitarian streak in humanity.

None that I know of. I’d love to see it though!

Mostly American stuff, the way I like to play solo is with fingerpicking chord melodies. I’ll usually try to find a way to play the tune with my open chords and then mix in some other voicings to spice it up.

When playing early dance music I prefer to strum diads though; I’m usually in the middle or low register in a dance pit, filling out the sound for the melody instruments like vielle or citole.

I sing and play folk music on the guitar and early music on lute and recorder (my favorite size is the tenor).