SwingingTheLamp
@SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social
- Comment on Murica 1 week ago:
If it’s me on the bike, know that I’m pitying you. -6°C is nothing. I drove a lot of miles as a delivery driver, and saw a lot of faces behind windshields in that time. Very few happy faces. Driving makes people miserable.
- Comment on So, is the USA screwed? 1 week ago:
Enough farmland? I suggest reading up on the Ogallala Aquifer. Also, where the best climate zones for agriculture will be 50 years from now.
- Comment on Over 20M 'people' listed as 100+ years old in the SS database? 2 weeks ago:
I feel like Betteridge’s Law of Headlines applies here, too. If Leon had found fire (fraudulent benefits), he would have posted fire instead of smoke.
- Comment on Good morning. 2 weeks ago:
Borrowing is not an option?
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
Compare the situation to all the noise and outrage, but nobody shows up.
- Comment on Why do some laws exist if everyone is expected to just break them? 4 weeks ago:
Given those conditions, everybody drives the speed of the slowest driver.
- Comment on [deleted] 4 weeks ago:
And what will not doing it accomplish?
- Comment on Electoral politics doesn't get the job done 4 weeks ago:
The strike is not the start of the exercise, oh, no! To pull off a huge action like this will take coordination, spreading awareness, cultivating relationships of trust, establishing lines of communication, laying the foundations by organizing, and getting people primed for action. That’s what we lack now.
Right now, we could all just choose to disobey together, and there are so many of us that they couldn’t stop us. But it would take a lot of people; only a few here and there taking action would simply leave those few destitute or in jail.
A general strike is not the goal, it’s the announcement that we’re organized. That awareness, those relationships, that trust, doesn’t just have to go away…
- Comment on Why do some laws exist if everyone is expected to just break them? 4 weeks ago:
If that’s true, then it would be a good idea to have everybody converge on a particular speed. It doesn’t seem practical to negotiate that speed amongst a constantly-changing set of drivers, it probably needs to be chosen in advance. That seems like a natural function of government, to choose the consensus speed through a process designed to represent everybody in the community.
To communicate to drivers entering the roadway this consensus speed which everybody must travel at—for safety—the government could, say, post it on signs located along the roadside.
But that’s probably just a ridiculous fantasy. How then should all drivers negotiate the consensus speed to ensure safety?
- Comment on The one drawback to walking at night 4 weeks ago:
Hard to say. I see women out walking alone at night all the time in my city, at least a handful just past my house every evening. (It’s a university town.) I passed one woman happily chatting on her phone, and oblivious to the world, while riding home tonight after dark. The last time anyone was attacked by a stranger was, I dunno? It definitely happens, but it’s years between instances. They’d probably be safer in the late night hours, with hardly any car traffic. A lot more people get killed by cars.
- Comment on Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering? 4 weeks ago:
I hear ya. I just wanted to provide an example in which social norms lead people to do the right thing.
- Comment on Why do smokers specifically seem to be disproportionally bad for littering? 4 weeks ago:
If you want a happier example, there’s the trash in Wisconsin state parks. The Dept. of Natural Resources used to place trash receptacles in our state parks, and haul the trash away. That worked, people put their trash in the bins, because that’s the social expectation.
But the DNR lacked the staff to keep up with the trash. Sometimes animals would get in and spread trash around, but mostly, people would pile trash on or around cans and dumpsters. If that’s where you put your trash, that’s where you put your trash, right?
So, the DNR simply stopped putting trash receptacles in the parks altogether, and announced that you’d have to pack your own trash out. And it worked! Without a socially-sanctioned place to deposit trash in the park, people pack it out. (Mostly. Humans are still essentially animals, so various detritus gets dropped, but no garbage bags full of food scraps left on the ground for the raccoons.)
- Comment on To my late wife, Carmen, my spicy little habanara pepper (pls read and lmk if you think it's okay to send) 5 weeks ago:
To add to the other comment, saying “always-late wife” would convey the correct meaning to most English speakers.
- Comment on To my late wife, Carmen, my spicy little habanara pepper (pls read and lmk if you think it's okay to send) 5 weeks ago:
If she’s dead, I don’t think it matters what you say.
- Comment on Gimme some evidence that anyone at all in the government is pushing back on Trump with any effectiveness at all. Someone throw me a bone here. 😬 5 weeks ago:
I dunno, man, it just feels like the ol’ fascist/totalitarian tactic of flooding the zone with shit until people get exhausted from fighting it has worked, people are exhausted, and there’s this energy of elated resignation, like, we can’t swim upstream anymore, so fuck it, riding the current is kind of fun (and the inevitable waterfall is out of sight and out of mind for the moment).
- Comment on What's the deal with male loneliness? 1 month ago:
So young men are believing that everyone except them are all in relationships and/or fucking all the time, and believing that them not doing those things makes worth less as a human being.
I just want to add that, in virtually every online discussion I’ve seen about the dynamic between men and women, if a man says something incel-ish, or otherwise not popular, there will be somebody (almost always a woman) who will fire back a retort like, “yeah, but no woman wants to be with you anyway,” (I haven’t seen it on Lemmy, which is wonderful.)
There it is: Your opinion, and by extension your worth as a person, is based on your ability to have sex. Is it any wonder that men think that, after being explicitly informed so?
- Comment on What's the deal with male loneliness? 1 month ago:
Without a single coherent thought expressed!
- Comment on Hurry 2 months ago:
Sheeeeit, don’t hit a guy with those turgid vacuoles without a NSFW tag.
- Comment on Where's the mayor? 2 months ago:
This is the guy who set a woman on fire in a subway car.
- Submitted 2 months ago to [deleted] | 25 comments
- Comment on ohh ... 2 months ago:
Waiting times are atrocious here in the U.S. The earliest in-person appointment that I can get with my GP is about 6 months out. Non-urgent surgeries are sometimes take close to a year. A friend recently had to keep a bladder drain in after surgery for an extra week because there were no doctors who could do the 5-minute removal available.
Anybody who says that long wait times are unique to public health systems is lying.
- Comment on Do you consider Taylor Swift to be of the working class and why? 2 months ago:
No. There’s no hard-and-fast definition of the working class that everybody agrees upon, but there are some common ones. She’s certainly not part of the Marxist proletariat, since I’m certain that she and her management team are smart enough to have invested her money so that she never need work again, if she so desired. Also, she employs a small army of people to put on tours. Similarly, she has far too much money to be part of the working class as loosely defined by people who must sell their labor to survive. From what I understand, she came from an upper-middle class family, so she’s not even working class by culture.
I can sort of see an argument that she puts on a very physically-demanding show, exchanging her labor for money, but performers traditionally haven’t been considered working class.
- Comment on I don't have a purpose in life and feel like a robot. This cannot be good for my mental health, but I don't know how or what to change. How do I change? 2 months ago:
I suggest reading the book Running on Empty by Dr. Janice Webb. Maybe it will explain some things. (Or maybe it won’t. I’m no expert.)
- Comment on The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful 2 months ago:
Seems like the author could’ve cited plenty of examples, then, but just didn’t?
- Comment on The Tulsi Gabbard Smears Are Unfounded, Unfair, and Unhelpful 2 months ago:
With that title, I was expecting that the author could name more than 3 alleged smears from long ago.
- Comment on This world is cruel… 3 months ago:
First thing I thought of was the “Elementary School Musical” episode of South Park.
- Comment on True Story 3 months ago:
You say that, but “vote blue no matter who” is exactly this argument under the paint.
- Comment on True Story 3 months ago:
I’m on this kick of pointing out that the utilitarian ethical calculation still works with 100% Hitler and 100.1% Hitler. Harm minimization, baby!
- Comment on True Story 3 months ago:
Oh boy, if you haven’t, read its history. Its real history. Wild stuff.
- Comment on True Story 3 months ago:
To continue this thought, you might be interested to know how neuroscience tells us the brain works: In short, the unconscious mind decides and acts, and the conscious mind makes up stories about why. Quite often, the story is just wrong, or at least misguided. Those voters have a real reason that they don’t understand or won’t admit to themselves, and a million reasons that they give instead to explain it.
Yes, we need to drop the misconception that people rationally decide about much of anything, and learn about their real reasons.