things aren't really as bad as you make them sound 
a lot of people don't have cash savings but only 1 or 2 per thousand people is actually homeless. you can live paycheck to paycheck in the sense that you can't miss a mortgage payment, and still have a house to sell or friends/family to help if you need time to find a new job
alienation in working conditions is in fact very precedented; working women gritted their teeth and bore it when they had to do 70-80 hours per week of grueling, dangerous work for half wages in textile mills, and things were even worse back in england
my sister's fairly poor and she's worked on average probably ~20 hours a week for the last decade. food stamps and housing assistance help a lot, and she's always gotten health/dental through medicaid
she's not trans, but I am. not that it really matters since trans people are a rounding error to that "95%" number, but fwiw things aren't the worst, most of the trans people I talk to are getting by or doing well, at least economically. for myself the state is currently paying for transition stuff. it can be scary to be caught in the middle of a culture war and I really feel for trans kids especially but I'm not usually afraid for my safety anymore when I go out, and I live in a bright red county. also ime transfems at least share hrt pretty readily if anyone ever needs it and there are support networks. work is more difficult but not as remotely hard as it was for trans people in the past. you have a decent shot of being okay nowadays I think.
in fact, yeah compare this to history. probably ~2 million people died in a pointless, yearslong war for the tsar before russians ran out of faith. in germany it was chronic hunger, population body weights plummeting and child mortality rising. where is that here? people generally aren't as online as you and me are fretting over the blogs every day. if they can find a tolerable job and put food on the table and not feel physically in danger and have some hope for the future that's really all it takes, no matter the day to day frustrations. especially if they have a car, some nice stuff, some savings.
and of course people with a home and a career - which is most americans by the way - are perfectly fine. anxieties about maybe having to slum it with the poors pretty much just prove that they're still invested in maintaining their position in a system that they feel able to work to their relative benefit
your question about what makes hexbears special is fair. it reminds me of an enzensberger quote about media crit:
Basically, the user of the media appears as a defenceless victim ... the programme makers on the other hand as crafty criminals. This polarity is maintained with great seriousness and considerable thoroughness: manipulators and manipulated, actors and imitators, simulants and simulated, stupefiers and stupefied face one another in a fine symmetry.
The question, on which side any particular theorist is to be found, has to remain open. Either he makes no use of the media at all, in which case he doesn't know what he's talking about; or he subjects himself to them, and then the question arises, through what miracle he has escaped their effects; because unlike everyone else, he has remained completely intact morally, can distinguish in a sovereign manner between deception and reality and enjoys complete immunity in the face of the idiocy which he sorrowfully diagnoses in them.
imo the answer is that mostly we're nerds with no particular reason to fall into this camp beyond a personal affinity for it. without a real material push the appeal here can only ever get as far as setting up a booth next to that one american monarchist youtuber in the marketplace of ideas, both of you hoping that you can talk loud enough to drown out the loudspeakers in the liberal pavilion. you'll get a more or less random share of the people wandering away from the liberals, but that's it. and it'll be the equivalent of cultural christianity, like you just know that hardly any of the high school age communists on reddit are going to be sticking around for long after they finish college and start working as engineers or whatever.
at this point we're misfits, same as that monarchist or any weirdo fash. we just believe that ultimately when things get bad enough, if a popular movement can arise and have enough of a class orientation, and the bourgeois state is weak enough, then there will be fertile ground to expand this coterie of nerds into a socialist mass movement. until then it's pretty much stage one of the standard formula for development of a leninist party: collect the small number of people we can get while getting ready for things to actually change enough for anyone else to start listening
after my last job I just kept my laptop and phone for like 18 months and nobody hassled me. I did eventually dig out the prepaid fedex boxes and shipped them back but I doubt they were even using the same model anymore at that point haha
For how many people do you think the system actually "works?"
to put a number on it? almost certainly more than 19 out of 20 people in the first world
Do you think the system works for the mods of this trans discord server?
I think it's likely, although ofc I can't say for sure. it's surprisingly difficult to be failed by the system to the point that you're not invested at all in it anymore.
I was reading an article yesterday telling the story of a trans man who couldn't get T in florida because of desantis. that's about a worst case scenario but in the end he just got to the front of a waitlist to get some, and then saved up enough money to move out of state anyway. there's a lot of wealth in this country, and life or death stuff is not very often tightened to the point that people would start throwing molotovs at police cars out of desperation
they believe it because the people around them believe it and because they were exposed to it from a young age when they hadn't yet developed critical thinking skills
they believe it because they have no material reason to reject it, full stop
These people don't trust the system, otherwise they wouldn't have rules against cops
I used to know someone who spent years in prison and hated the cops to the point that he got re-arrested for flying into a rage when one tried to ask him questions.
but he also hated china for taking "our" jobs. even as a racialized victim of police brutality he still identified with this idea of america. in fact, he talked constantly about how much money there was to be made in starting a business
people believe the propaganda because they trust the system that spews it. and they trust the system because it still works for them, or they think it does. it's no different from any liberal counterrevolutionary.
it's weird to call that "actual" morality given that it doesn't exist. there is no god independent of human social relations. but we still have morality
when their silks are stuffed with so many precious gems that the bullets are bouncing off them I think that's the point where I just lose all sympathy
within a Marxist framework, there are no 'good' and 'bad', merely a historically deterministic sequence of class antagonisms
amoral communism thus is not terribly interested in this discussion, and anyone here that adheres to that framework is excused from the discussion as having won the argument
I don't think this is really correct or at least not the best way to put it.
morality is a real thing that's shaped by (and in turn shapes) material conditions. it can be different in different epochs as things change - for example, capitalism introducing factory work started to unravel old patriarchal morality and led to the first successful womens movements. things like very cheap plant-based food and textiles and climate concerns are chopping away at carnist morality. class war dissolves the edifice of bourgeois morality like calvinist brainworms about one's "station" being a sign of god's favor (which of course makes it hard to question the rich). etc etc
at some point marx got spooked by the hegelian abyss and became conspicuously occupied with trying to put his conception of history on firm footing that didn't depend on morality. that's where you get the quotes of him insisting that the framework doesn't itself rest on today's passing morality- even though it can still explain it!
even worse, smuglords sneering at non-class antagonisms fail to see how those antagonisms work themselves out. e.g. rosa on womens rights:
If, however, there is a feeling of injustice in large segments of society – says Friedrich Engels, the co-founder of scientific socialism – it is always a sure sign that the economic bases of the society have shifted considerably, that the present conditions contradict the march of development. The present forceful movement of millions of proletarian women who consider their lack of political rights a crying wrong is such an infallible sign, a sign that the social bases of the reigning system are rotten and that its days are numbered.
moral questions can themselves be a site of class struggle so there's no need to excuse them to the other room as presuppositional while we talk about class struggle as a separate thing.
I don't really want to get too much more into the weeds on this because it's such a tired topic in vegan spaces but the takeaway is that "amoral" (i.e. "anti-moral") materialism is imo a vulgarization of marxism
his on-screen persona is to just be aggressively inoffensive and let that be funny. I don't think it worked that well on snl but portlandia was good for him cause there was lots of space for mild whimsy. him and carrie sleeping in separate child-sized beds is like stuck in my mind
"chairman gonzalo steam baths" on the sign over the door 
federation is a hopelessly techbrained idea in the first place.
the whole dream is that it frees people from censorship and eliminates single points of failure by letting you move freely through the fediverse from anywhere. except it turns out that the work of moderators is a huge value add that people actually want, and even for that reason alone it turns out to matter quite a lot which home instance you choose
what real problem does this architecture solve? users are still subject to unaccountable admin decisions, but now this extends beyond the hex admin team to others we don't necessarily trust. comms still die if instances get shut down.
redfash centralization stays winning
"the failing new york times" is unironically ingrained in my speaking vocabulary and I don't even think of trump when I say it, it's that good
I live in one of a thousand identical cookie cutter american towns, the kind 20 minutes away from the nearest thing that could be called a highway, just backroads and little towns at the crossroads. no monopoly capitalism in sight really, just everyone on their grind with their shitty small businesses. tow yards and head shops, corrupt cops and section 8 landlords, drug dealing and drug doing.
the farmers and business owners have nice houses on big plots of private land farther out. I've driven around out there, it's very beautiful with lots of trees and grass. but the towns themselves are not. all the local chamber of commerce assholes are too miserly to reinvest any capital, so you see them driving their motor trikes and waxed convertibles around these sad, weathered buildings with crumbling brickwork and overgrown sidewalks. they hose down the grimy windows once in a while and scowl at the sterile corporate chain places that look nice I guess because they don't blow all of their gross margin on lake boats and granite countertops.
my therapist's office is in a converted church. they use the old sanctuary as a yoga studio. most weeks I go to another office too, in an ordinary single-family house that someone partitioned up into office space. a receptionist sits at a desk in the foyer, and the living room and dining room etc all have desks in them. I walk through the kitchen to get to my appointment. the florist is in the back of someone's house, the county magistrate leases a couple of rooms in the back of a gas station, etc. it's whatever I guess.
I live in a kind of closet that's billed as one "bedroom" out of a two bedroom apartment. our building is falling apart- the hallway is full of garbage, we've got mice, the ceiling is slumping in, and the front door doesn't lock properly. but if you go to our slumlord's landscaping business to drop off a rent check it's actually one of the few really nice looking businesses I've seen here. usually I only see that kind of bright new construction out of healthcare and police. I guess the secret to running a profitable business in this area is to vacuum up the medicaid benefits and rent assistance checks and "fund the police" bidenbucks flowing out from the cities where actual economic activity still happens.
this whole area is on life support. there's nothing really here to attract big capital and anything that gets big enough mostly goes elsewhere, leaving the remaining petty tyrants to pick up pennies. and since small business owners suck at doing the work of capitalism, everything stagnates and slowly goes to shit. capital dissipates into small consumption, nobody really builds anything, bright kids go off to college and don't come back. it's crabs in a bucket for everyone who's left
I've been driving to a regional city every week lately and every time I come back here it's like a weight settles on my shoulders throughout the drive. city bustle and sidewalks and fire hydrants and corner stores and big highway interchanges gradually give way to back roads lined with boarded up houses, yards full of junk, and sagging porches. one poverty to another but the difference is that one is suffocated by just a surly, reactionary opposition to everything alive that I love about the city. you can feel it in the air when driving around here. even the idea of building/maintaining a sidewalk seems baffling to people who can't imagine paying for someone else to have a nice place to walk.
> Carnegie may fleece his workers — he has 20,000 of them — of only 50 cents a day and yet net, from sunrise to sunset, $10,000 profits; the banker with plenty of money to lend can thrive with a trifling shaving of each individual note; but the apple woman on the street corner must make a 100 and 500 percent profit to exist. For the same reason, the middle class, the employer of few hands, is the worst, the bitterest, the most inveterate, the most relentless exploiter of the wage slave. - Daniel de Leon
the petty bourgeoisie here snarls at big urban capital like a dog who thinks that a human is trying to steal its kibble. they're terrified of being proletarianized, so they cling with a death grip to their shitty little fiefdoms and urge everyone to "buy local" and put up hundreds of american flags and trump 2024 signs and grumble about the socialist elites sending all of the money to china. that's not going to do anything for them. they've been losing this war for hundreds of years, and it's joever for real now that neoliberals are at the helm and manufacturing is gone and the only "comparative advantage" left in this country is in knowledge work that flocks to the cities and leaves decline at the opposite pole.
but this is a decadent empire so even the failures stay comfortable, and so they still believe in the system, and so they still try to work it, and so they keep losing. it's pathetic. reactionaries plop down and have a tantrum about how it's all so unfair that their idyllic self-sufficient stardew valley life is slipping from their grasp because wages are too high and nobody wants to work anymore and interest rates are too high and trans people are mocking god, or whatever.
I don't understand how anyone can feel anything towards these sawdust tyrants other than pity or more likely disgust. so it's been wild to live around a few rarely-employed pauper-proletarians always going on with their friends about how they're basically temporarily-embarrassed business owners who are going to finally get ahead. put some money together, set up a business, buy some box trucks, hire a few guys! satori it's time for you to get on your shit, all you have to do is follow kim kardashian's advice and you'll be the boss and be the one yelling at your employees and you can buy one of those nice houses and not worry so much.
it feels like I'm in a twilight zone episode where there's some kind of wacky premise involved. I hope my experience isn't representative, that not every dead end town is full of people stupid enough or cruel enough to become true believers when business tiktok serves them up hustler ideology on a trashcan lid. it's so corny istg. wanting to be the boss is like a somehow even-lamer version of someone reading the fountainhead after having a bad experience at the dmv and deciding that collectivism is the root of all evil. I don't know how anyone can drive every day around this bleak place full of and still dream of having a scrap of it for themselves. have some dignity for christ's sake
only extensions listed on amo. mozilla got a takedown notice and delisted BPC which made it essentially impossible to install, since you can't sideload xpis. firefox mobile is fully locked to their proprietary service
the americans had previously supported several draft proposals to have the prc on the unsc while also recognizing the roc with their own separate seat. on the day of this vote the assembly was just about to fully recognize the prc as china's representative. so I think it's fair to say that the eleventh hour american proposal to add a 2/3 supermajority requirement to any measure "depriving" the kmt of representation was effectively a vote on the un splitting china
to be clear this is a vote on some last-second american maneuvering to try to split china into separate seats (prc/roc)
I used to live in this pretty small beachfront town. it was strange area- there were a few vegetarian/vegan restaurants in town but only one that served meat. a lot of animal lovers around, you know the vibe I mean. and so this one meat restaurant was hated by basically everyone, to the point that it was a running joke in town. nobody would be caught dead going in there. the thing is, it seemed as if the restaurant owner was trying aggressively to piss off the residents. the whole concept of the restaurant was basically to serve a pile of sloppy joe or something in a little metal pail? like basically trying to be as unapologetically gross as possible to make some kind of point about meat. and as you'd expect, I never once saw a customer in that restaurant. no employees ever seemed to be around either, just the owner. something was definitely fishy about it. I don't know how the owner got the money to keep that place running, since the place was open for at least 13 seasons. maybe his robot wife had a side hustle.
the arkansas times says she's married to one stephen "le pol face" meeks, a republican state representative
