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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2023

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  • I work in education. I need something for my young learners. You wouldn’t think so, but little kids can sense the anxiety of us adults. I try my best to incorporate community resilience into my lessons, and I’d love something that will help further deprogram the individualism they get from all other areas of their American lives.

    Edit: Also parents and admins here are pretty politically and historically illiterate, but they’re foxbrained enough to recognize Marx or Lenin. But probably not someone like Eugene V. Debs.



  • Everyone goes through the stages of slam poetry.

    Initial Exposure: You go with your college friend to watch the prettiest, most bohemian girl on the planet from their psych 101 class perform slam poetry at the bicycle-repair-shop-and-underground-cafe in your college town. You’re floored by her emotional story of helping a friend call the National Suicide Hotline. A single tear rolls down her face as she chokes out her final verse. You’re floored by her performance.

    Second Exposure: You watch the next performer nervously address the mic. They are somehow the most well groomed person you’ve ever seen and the sweatiest person you’ve ever seen. The Christmas lights that are hanging a foot above the stage dance off from glistening forehead. He is funny, weaving a story about his precocious little brother stealing mom’s credit card to by Pokémon cards. Then boom. Cancer. He hangs his head and continues, finishing softly and existing the stage swiftly. You’re moved…but suspicious.

    Final Exposure: You’ve watch a few more acts and are starting to see a pattern. A mother tells a story about her miscarriage 20 years ago. An obviously not-out-yet student laments about feeling rejected by his roommate’s ex-girlfriend. An eternally benched football player in his second senior year recounts his struggle to get a scholarship while juggling a job and watching his siblings. Finally a middle aged man in a stained Star Wars shirt opines about some lost love and your pretty sure he’s talking about a child he met online. You and your friend decide to leave, get drunk, and relentlessly make fun of the acts you just saw.











  • Imagine a pretend political ideology called cleavism. Given its name you say it’s all about cleaving the good in society from the bad, whatever the hell that means. But there are so-called “cleavists” out there who insist cleavism is about joining the bad and the good together. What gives? Well, in practice cleavism has little to do with the two opposing definitions of “to cleave” (“to split” and “to join”). It’s really just named after some guy with the surname Cleaver or something.

    Political ideologies aren’t medical diagnoses. You can’t derive their meaning like you can with atrial arrhythmic induced tachycardia cardiomyopathy. If you try this naive etymology out on anarchism then you’ll reduce that ideology to nothing more than a non-substantive, meaningless, circular definition. Conservatives conserve. Liberals liberate. Socialists socialize. See? Meaningless.

    Unfortunately for the entire world, conservatism has never been about “protecting the good in society.” That’s just a vapid and empty wish for what you want conservatism to mean. You’d be hard pressed to find any reputable political science text that would trivialize one of the most dominate ideologies of the past two centuries like this. Let alone claim there is some inherent goodwill baked into the ideology.