Hunter/gatherer and early farming societies typically had a lot more leisure time than we do today. Some researchers estimated they only ‘worked’ 15-30 hours a week, and a lot of that was dependent on seasons. In addition, their egalitarian structure and lack of pursuit for excess material goods meant no pressure for long work hours.

I had the same experience on a trip to Europe. All of the European customs officials were happy, kind, and welcoming, all while still doing their job. When I came back to the states, the customs official was dressed in all black, sidearm clearly visible, and he was mean-mugging and being condescending the entire time. When he asked if I had bought anything while I was overseas, I said yes, and he just stared at me. For 10 to 15 seconds at least. I wasn’t sure if he was waiting for me to say something, produce receipts, stop resisting? Eventually he huffed loudly and angrily asked if I had spent more than $10k; no, I did not.

He stamped the things he needed stamp hard enough to shake his little kiosk and gruffly growled for me to move on. If a citizen gets treated like that, I don’t want to know what a non-citizen has to go through.

The biggest fault of Game theory is that it is biased towards instant utility and short-term rewards. It does not model for scenarios where reduced short-term rewards can lead to greater gains in the long-term.

In short, decisions made for singular benefit typically have worse long-term results than decisions accounting for collective benefit.

They’re fairly ubiquitous in the States, regardless of blue or red.

A lot of HOAs are managed by the community to establish community rules and create a common fund for things like landscaping and snow removal. An example of some common rules are prohibitions on keeping broken vehicles anywhere except your garage, and keeping lawns from becoming overgrown to the point where it creates a problem for neighbors. For the most part, those kinds of HOAs are not too intrusive and can be a net positive for the community.

However, a growing number of them are created and managed by the development companies that built the homes, and their primary objective is to maintain “property values” in community. I.E. they create and rules that promote uniformity, and will put a lien on non-conforming homeowners property. This results in the HOA literally taking ownership of the house away from the non-confirming homeowner and evicting them from the community. Then the development company will resell the house at full value.

I’ve heard stories of people being fined hundreds of dollars for simple things like planting a garden, painting a door, and hanging new curtains.

“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.

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.

That’s actually a plot point of the movie: the upper and ruling classes are aliens who manipulate the human populace through commands hidden “underneath” the facade of mass media and advertisements. The aliens look like ugly, malformed humans, but only those with the right tools could see them for what they really are. For being nearly 40 years old, the movie holds up well, and the themes and story seem even more relevant today.

It also has one of the best fight scenes in movie history.

That’s great advice. I used to hate tomatoes when I was younger, but as an adult I found that I actually love fresh garden tomatoes. Store-bought tomatoes had a flavor that younger me could only describe as “sharply dirt-like.” The tomatoes I pluck from my own plants are sweet and delicious, and the heirloom varieties sold in farmer’s markets are usually tasty, too.

It’s a scene from the 1988 movie “They Live”

I have to try this. I’m going to make playlist of sea shanties, Alestorm, and Captain Dan & the Scurvy Crew and move it to the top of my “get stuff done” folder.

I can’t speak for the other poster, but the way I see is is that “forced inclusion” is where the script directs viewer attention to it in a protracted, unnatural manner that is not pertinent to the plot. For instance, the script may be as blunt as a character saying “Wow, I can’t believe you made it this far despite being a [marginalized out-group],” or it could be a little more subtle by offering a stereotyped representation of [marginalized out-group] without any kind of deeper exploration. i.e. Tokenism

Star Trek, for the most part, dove into social subjects deeper, more meaningful way than other media at the time. Like other users have pointed out, TOS confronted racism and gender roles head on by placing a black female character on the bridge. By never drawing attention to those traits, the show issued such a strong rebuke against racism and male chauvinism that no more needed to be said. In my view, that is inclusion that is not forced upon the viewer; it is implied, but unless the viewer is explicitly looking for it, they’d never notice.

Agreed. Season three TNG is peak Star Trek. That said, and at the risk of being flayed by the Star Trek community at large, I think DS9 was the best series, taken as a whole.

Yep! Not only is incredibly economical, it’s a healthier meal than most “traditional” American breakfasts.

Didn’t stop conservative media from deriding it as millennial over-indulgence. Vilifying the millennial tendency of frugality + preference for plants-based diet choices by portraying avocado toast as excessive and soy milk as emasculating, along with a concerted effort to deliver narrative to the /pol/ audience, it not only swayed the opinions of older generations, but spurred parts of the younger generations to resent each other. I’m sure meat industry profits were also in the mix somewhere.

The only winners in the culture war are the ones who drive the narratives, and it’s been that way in the US since radio was invented.

You are right that worker unions should have the weight of collective bargaining behind them, enough to affect the big changes. However, the US has demonstrated again and again that it will just crush unions if they start to irritate the ownership class a little too much. Like what Reagan did to air traffic controllers, what Scott Walker did to the Wisconsin public employees union, and the 2022 railway worker labor dispute under Biden.

Unions have been defanged by decades of ownership class lobbying and regulatory capture. The executive branch has no qualms about neutralizing and marginalizing union workers who step too far out of line. Something much bigger than labor unions is needed, but I’m afraid the ownership class has us all so exhausted from overwork and the media too wary of our neighbors for that to happen. For the public to build the kind of movement it needs will take both a hugely impactful economic downturn that affects everyone, and as much as I wish it weren’t the case, an immensely charismatic figure to pull them together. Whenever someone with an anti-status quo message and the charisma to start pulling people together starts to gain traction, they invariably end up on the business end of the CIA.

It’s hard not to feel defeated and deflated, especially when we’re all so exhausted.

If only it could be so easy.

Ostensibly, the only significant difference between a megachurch pastor and the end-times-sign-holding street corner crier is audience approval.

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.

A couple weeks ago I had a back-and-forth with a conservative poster who staunchly believed that the GOP is still the “Party of Lincoln.” I was telling them how that wasn’t the case anymore, described the fifth party system, explained that the two parties switched views in the mid-20th century. They responded by saying I had been brain-washed by the MSM and calling me a sheep. I hadn’t seen so many emojis in a reply since ~2009, so I shrugged them off as a bot.

Maybe I gave them the benefit of the doubt a bit too freely.

Agreed. The amount of down votes you’re receiving shows that, even on lemmy, >25% of users have an immediate and ingrained distaste to others sharing the thought that religion can be dangerous. The religious hold their own religion in such high regards, not realizing that, for the most part, they were never given a choice of which religion, let alone the choice to not be religious at all.

“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion” - Steven Weinberg

“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.