As a white male, through sheer dumb luck I figured out the lie years ago. But too many of the white guys I know never did.

I would say it's tied into a just world fallacy - the idea that the great majority of the rich earned their easy lives, and the great majority of the people struggling are only suffering from their own lack of character and work ethic. Then you perceive anyone pushing for social change as trying to undermine justice instead of establish it.

Some white males dot all the 'i's and cross all the 't's and watch their life go off track anyway, and then blame everyone that isn't wealthy and isn't a white male. But when you're lucky, instead they start to realize the game is rigged. (Edit: I want to rephrase this paragraph another way. White men try to reach success playing by the rules, and fail. Some realize the world isn't just, and come to appreciate that people that are not white men have been fighting all the same battles they have, only harder. Others cling on to the just world myth, and blame their inability to succeed on everyone trying to undermine the existing system.)

So is American centrist better or worse than libertarianism? Flame war in 3....2.....1.... poof

Just kidding. I'd call (market) libertarianism the unwitting servant of corporate authoritarianism.

I can't tell if you're being serious with the "ban men" bit or not.

To be clear, as horrifying as these mass shootings are they represent something like one in a million men. A more compelling argument for banning men would be rape or domestic violence statistics.

I think it's sad and interesting how humans seem inclined to look for heroes to put on pedestals. I know logically that we're all human and nobody is a flawless moral paragon, but I still find myself looking for people to admire and treat as moral superhumans.

I have a very weak understanding of all of this, so take what I write with more skepticism than even the average internet comment.

If the wikipedia page for Liquid Flouride Thorieum Reactors (LFTR reactors) is not a hoax or mis-stated progaganda piece, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_fluoride_thorium_reactor then if LFTR is not a miracle solution it's at least a better option than conventional reactors:

1. Much lower (zero?) risk of meltdown.
2. Cannot be used to produce the kind of fissionable materials required for a nuclear weapon.
3. The most dangerous waste product has a half-life of thirty years, so in less than five-hundred years the waste is harmless.
4. Thorium is relatively abundant.

According to the same article, national governments never invested seriously in Thorium nuclear reactors in the 1950s until today because they can't be used to make weapons.

That's amazing, thanks for sharing! I just sent the link to half a dozen family members.

I was all but screaming this from the rooftops during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, because the military-industrial complex has doubled down: they managed to get the country to spend trillions on a war while simultaneously cutting taxes on the rich.

I have three of his books in print and plan on getting the rest from Ebay or used book stores. Thanks for the offer, though.

From a purely practical mental health perspective, holding on to rage and frustration just increases your own trauma. So in that sense anything you can do to let go of the events in your mind are better for your own well being.

But there's a huge gap between "letting go of what happened" and "forgiving the attacker", and that gap does need to exist.

Good point. I expressed my ideas poorly.

I live in Pennsylvania. When I moved into this house sixteen years ago, on summer nights the back yard sky was full of bats. Some time since then something must have happened, because I'm lucky to see a bat three or four times all summer.

I was thinking about programs to encourage home ownership over renting. A renter can move to find better employment options. A homeowner has to find a house buyer first and go through the tricky process of selling the house and moving and finding a new job all at once. So often the homeowner stays put. Maybe that's one more thing driving down wages?

It's easy to care. It takes a serious push to act.

I'm still struggling with it. But as crazy as it sounds I'm grateful for Trump's election, because reflecting on that finally drove home that everything has been fucked all along.

Right. They're not banning dissent, they're banning trolls. Trolls by definition don't add anything useful to the discussion. I could pop into a Raddle conversation and state a hateful view, but as long as I use clean language I'll get a lot of insults in response but no ban.

And as amongstclouds points out below, the source code is open.

I find the no-sugar-added applesauce in stores is pretty sweet but still edible. The regular applesauce is too sweet for me.

I don't care about farting. I care about stomach discomfort. So the other comments on my post were more useful - the body adjusts, soaking and rinsing helps a lot, etc...

There's nothing I can do if the VPS provider snoops. I just figure it's less likely than a VPN or my local ISP snooping.

I wouldn't try to organize a revolution or host a video piracy site that way. Just have fewer parties tracking how often I buy hemorrhoid cream.

Thanks. I saw that recommendation but didn't know it would affect gas and discomfort.

I appreciate your honesty. We have to start somewhere.

I am relatively new to anarchist ideas myself, and when I bring it up in conversations about politics I get blank stares. I guess I need to work on my oratory skills. Everybody agrees with me that bureaucracy is a corrupting and inefficient thing most of the time, but when I make the argument it's inevitably, inescapably corrupt I lose them.

I'm not at the point where throwing molotovs at cops is an option. I'll try to get involved in little things, though.

I admit I haven't done it, but if I were to use a VPN I would rent a virtual server with cheap bandwidth and run the VPN software on it myself. An interested government snoop could track down my data, but they would have to target me personally to do that. A standard VPN provider can get all of the data from all of the customers harvested by a single warrant (or even just sell all of the data for money).

But again, what should we be doing instead of voting, then?

So what kind of active fighting against domination do you think we should be doing?

I want to change things but I'm not ready to grab a gun and go blast some politicians. Is that what you're doing (not that I expect you to confess on a public forum)? If not, then what?

Unfortunately there are hundreds of millions of Apple fanboyz.

And while I'm complaining, it irritates me to no end that Android has such a terrible software update standard. A grossly overpriced iPhone 7 from a few years back will get software updates for 5 or 6 years. A Samsung Galaxy Somethingorother from today probably won't get security fixes in four, maybe not even in three. Most other Android products are worse.

I keep kicking around the idea of getting a goddamn flip phone, and just buying a separate GPS and camera.

While Tim Cook is right here, it's important to remember - not that many at Raddle would forget - it's simply about money.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, and to a lesser extent Microsoft make a lot of money by data harvesting. Apple makes a lot of money, but not by data harvesting. So in this particular case Apple can point a finger at the competition and criticize them.