Ownership class needs to extract as much value as they can out of their workers. They think that if you don’t entangle healthcare with employment, then no one’s going to work anymore. I think it is all projection; the wealthy already don’t work nearly as hard as the people they exploit.
I have always hated warm coins, but I didn’t realize it until now. Your comment gave me a plain toast-flavored eureka moment; thank you.
“Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen is widely regarded as a patriotic anthem. It’s played at so many sporting events and political rallies that most people think it celebrates American pride. But the song itself is about a small-town kid who gets drafted, sent to war, and then comes home to find himself unemployed, homeless, and abandoned by the system that sent him there.
The irony is that media and propagandists grabbed the punchy chorus and stripped it from the rest of the song. An anti-establishment story about neglect and disillusionment that got balefully repurposed as an advertising jingle to drive military recruitment.
Some American grocery stores already tested the waters by posting armed guards in its stores. This article is a few years old, but the precedent stands.
https://retailwire.com/discussion/hy-vee-creates-its-own-armed-security-squad-to-deter-crime/
Hy-Vee last week announced the introduction of an in-house armed security team to manage theft and in-store disturbances.
The Midwest grocery chain said in a statement that it has long worked with third-party contractors or off-duty law enforcement that work in a security capacity. The goal of bringing it in-house is “to create a consistent look for the security team and consistent approach to customer service and security across all [its] stores.”
This is a very wholesome(?) case of “username checks out”… 😅
This thread reminds me of an Asimov short story where someone discovers that humor is just a vehicle for psychological experimentation being done on humans by an extraterrestrial intelligence. Now that humans know where jokes come from, it’s no longer a useful tool to the observers and is removed from the testing environment…
“The gift of humor is gone,” said Trask drearily. “No man
will ever laugh again.”
And they remained there, staring, feeling the world shrink
down to the dimensions of an experimental rat cage—with
the maze removed and something, something about to be put in its place.
http://blog.ac-versailles.fr/villaroylit/public/Jokester.pdf
There was a post not too long ago discussing boobs and how people react to them. One of the responses was from a foreign aid worker in Haiti after the earthquake. In Haiti, it’s not uncommon for women to walk around with uncovered breasts. At first, the poster said, they found it extremely distracting, because boobs were everywhere. After a few days uncovered boobs stopped being novel and sexy, because they were everywhere.
Once their assignment in Haiti ended and they returned to their home country, boobs started being sexy again… all that to say that while they are a secondary sexual characteristic, it is a cultural construction whether or not they are seen as overtly sexual.
Please accept this hug from an internet stranger that is likely heading down the same road… hoping the symptoms end up being a huge nothingburger, but if not then I’m going to miss my hobbyist equipment.
I think it was directed at the second party. But also shouted at the boundless void in the hope that someone, something, anything with the power to make things make sense hears us. Just like most of my posts.
You shouldn’t anthropomorphize animal behavior by misinterpreting their instincts for human emotions. Feral and tame cats of all kinds will play with their food to hone hunting skills. Dogs will ravage and eviscerate other animals as play. Hamsters will eat their offspring under circumstances where it would mean the parent has a better chance to survive without them.
Cats do not “love seeing things in pain” for the same reason that dogs don’t “love” seeing a toy rabbit torn to shreds: both behaviors are rooted in their hunting instincts. True sadism (hurting or killing another being for no reason other than pleasure) has only been observed in animal groups that also possess higher-ordered cognitive and social traits, such as cetaceans and apes.
There are also a lot of people out there that will intentionally swerve to hit an animal. Mark Rober made a video a long time ago where 6% of drivers went out of their way to hit animals that were just chilling on the shoulder.
They are referring to when New Jersey had a huge problem with needles washing up on the beaches back in the 90s.
Hell yeah! Where all my New Jerseyans at?
Licking restaurant ashtrays is just what we kids did back then. We didn’t know any better!
“Human nature” is where material conditions intersects with cultural conditioning. “Left leaning” doesn’t mean anything in America, especially when the cultural underpinning of the society is consumerism and the acquisition of wealth.