jwiggler

Playing guitar. I’m bad, can’t really play with others, couldn’t play live, but being able to sing and play along to songs I love, putting my own spin on them, or getting into a rhythm and making up silly lyrics is one of the most valuable things I ever learned to do. Probably the single best thing I’ve done in my life is learn to play.

The proof is in the pudding folks

I would recommend reading or listening to Noam Chomsky’s Understanding Power. It is a compilation of several of his Q and As about his ideas about the US political and media systems. He has a whole book about the media called Manufacturing Consent, but Understanding Power will give you the lowdown.

Essentially, all mainstream US media is beholden to capitalistic (for advertising) or state (for funding) forces, so a person should always be aware that news sources are never going to print something that is against its own interest. Things like LGBTQ rights and right to abortion don’t put news outlets sources of money at risk, so they’re safe to print, but you’d be hard-pressed to find something that challenges, for example, the military industrial complex.

I’m not doing it much justice but that’s a very very general and incomplete jist of why it’s good to be skeptical of the mainstream media in general.

This particular attack probably had nothing to do with any of this, but she could probably be described as offensive from the economic equality standpoint, because she is a billionaire, from the environmental justice standpoint, because she is a frequent private-jet user, and from the music scene standpoint, because she seemingly intentionally pushes out other female artists from billboard spots by re-releasing albums in specific locations/time periods during which her peers are releasing their albums.

If you aren’t comfortable doing that then you aren’t comfortable “working on” your car.

You’ve written a whole lotta junk to essentially end on, “if you can’t jack up your car and remove the wheel, you shouldn’t be changing your headlight in the first place.”

Which is quite a dumb take.

Would you cancel a trip with your family that was already booked, that your mom completely planned out each activity in depth, that you already paid for, that you’ve been looking forward to, collectively, for over a year, because you found out you’d be contributing to a systemic problem for a week day?

You just might be a better person than me, at the end of the day.

I wasn’t sure whether hotels had already been booked or whether they cheaped out, that’s why I worded it like that. Could be.

No no you’re good, I didn’t take it that way. I think saying “next time” instead of “you should have” is a good way to help people realize that what they are doing might be destructive, without condemning them to the eternal pits of hell, so I appreciate you saying it that way.

I didn’t plan the trip myself, and I think there was some reason or another they chose AirBNB instead of a hotel. But yeah, if I ever do a trip like this again (unlikely), fuck an AirBNB

I’m going to Barcelona this week on a family trip. We’re staying in an AirBnb for a day. I think they’ve got a legitimate cause to spray people like me, who pretty much across the board don’t realize how much their privilege hurts regular working people.

lmaoo thank you for the laugh

That’s totally cool with me, I am absolutely a dumb idiot.

Difference is I don’t go around correcting people’s spelling to make them feel stupid.

oops for you, because in your comment you come off haughty and dumb. Happens to all of us though, no big deal.

insults someone for their spelling mistake

fails at simple reading comprehension

heh, oops!

I discovered Mastodon the night the Wagner group started marching toward Moscow, and was seeing live updates. From telegram or something. That was crazy.

True, but that just isn’t a maintainable party platform. There may be denial and violence in the short term, but at that point I think the Trumpian wing of the Republican party is in its death throes and is doomed.

I’m not so sure. While I don’t necessarily have a positive outlook on the future of American politics, I think the Democratic party is in a really good spot at the moment. The Republican party is completely beholden to one person right now. They are in a very, very bad spot re: extremism in their party. It’s essentially their party platform. We’re seeing the ramifications in the House, now. Their party is in disarray and is proving they can’t manage to even govern themselves. Meanwhile, Democrats are capitalizing on that disarray by consolidating around abortion access, protecting democratic institutions, and willingness to actually get things done. We can see this in the immigration reform bill that Trump nuked – that was set to be a huge policy win for conservatives and Democrats were willing to push it through.

If Trump loses this election, where does the Republican party have to go? They can’t just conjure up another personality like Trump – I think DeSantis proved that. They’ve alienated their moderate voters in favor of bigotry and disruption of the institutions they grew up with and helped maintain. Either they’re going to have to revert to establishment, pre-Trump conservatism or double down on his insanity, further alienating the moderate Republicans. And where would those moderates go besides the Democratic party, which, while sure, is supportive of gender-affirming care (a knock for them), at least they are still willing to uphold capitalistic, business-centric values (or in other words, socialism for me, not for thee).

If Trump wins, then the Democratic party is still gonna be around and having a field day with all the issues he causes (see: Dobbs ruling). I dunno this may be a hot take but I could see the Republican party crumbling, and Democrats splitting into left and right camps. Maybe someone can check me, because the more I think about it the more I see Republicans as a fringe extremist group and Democrats as capitalists, and then me over here thinking to myself, “How could we seize collective ownership of Amazon and Google’s computers?” lol

Glad he did an episode on this. People need an accessible and digestible way of understanding the threat of Project 2025.

Yeah, neoliberals are destroying the left, but I’ll take them over an authoritarian theocracy.

The top comment on this thread contains a conversation (argument) about Chomsky’s view on the term “genocide,” as well as his verbiage discussing Serbian-run concentration camps.

I listened to Understanding Power fairly recently and it definitely changed my outlook and broke me out of the lull of neoliberal self-satisfaction, and helped introduce me to other leftist writers. So I’m a fan of Chomsky’s, but it doesn’t sound like he had that good of a take on the Bosnian genocide. He seems to only reserve the word genocide for the Holocaust so as to keep its significance, and despite supporting a UN fact-finding commission that did find Serbia was running concentration camps, he refers to said camps as “refugee camps,” instead, and seems to infer people had the freedom to stay or leave as they please (even if this was technically true, I doubt it was practically true).

So, not a good look for him, even though he had other viewpoints that I’ve been strongly influenced by.

Have you happened to read the book? He has a chapter dedicated to his decision to call it technofeudalism rather than capitalism, hypercapitalism, technocapitalism, etc. Basically he’s saying profits have been decoupled from a company’s value, and that it’s no longer about creating a product to exchange for profit (which, in his words, are beholden to market competition) but instead about extracting rent (which is not beholden to competition – his example is while a landowner’s neighbors increase the values of their properties, the landowner’s property value also increases).

Anyways he describes Amazon, Apple store, Google Play, cloud service providers, as fiefdoms that collect rent from actual producers of products (physical goods, but also applications), and don’t actually produce anything, themselves, besides access to customers, while also extracting value from users of their technologies through personal information. They’re effectively leasing consumer attention in the same way landowners leased their lands to workers.

It sounds pretty accurate to me, but I haven’t had much time to chew on it. What’s your take on that idea?