Trump is a red herring under that headline, right? Hillary wouldn't have saved us. Her marginally different economic policies might postpone any such crash by a few months.

I don't mean to be defeatist, but I think an important perspective is that most people work jobs that serve and strengthen the state.

Yes, a forensic scientist and an Air Force noncombatant further the interests of the US government and all of the power mad puppeteers behind it. But is a job at Walmart, Microsoft, General Motors, Exxon, the Department of Motor Vehicles... really any better?

It's much harder to really separate yourself from all of that. I do pointless number crunching for an international megacorps. We don't serve the defense industry, military, or law enforcement, but it's a global corporation. Am I better than a forensic scientist or someone that does oil changes on an F-15?

I'm a white hetero male and I've never felt under assault here. All of the attacks against white men, heterosexual or otherwise, that I have seen here are on things that deserve criticism.

I haven't seen anyone advance the agenda that we should all be executed, imprisoned, etc... etc... I think we're fine.

I see what you mean. I apologize for my earlier misunderstanding.

As a not-quite-rabid Linux fan, I'm saddened by the rudeness in many Linux communities.

I've read Linus' justification for rudeness on the Linux mailing list - he's almost always dealing with long time colleagues and isn't just insulting novices or random strangers. Even if I agreed with that, his example isn't followed - the larger community takes his example meaning that you can tell anyone to go $(&$%$ their $(%&$(% for any reason or no reason whatsoever.

What's the old saying? "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by ignorance." A lot of conservatives are not willfully evil, just - to be generous - uninformed.

You won't get majority agreement on that. If the police attacks a crowd of protestors and the protestors resist, everyone will agree it's self-defense.

If you attack Congress it's self-defense against a system that fucks the 99%, but most people don't see the connection so they won't view it that way.

I found a Chrome add-on to delete all of my Facebook content without deleting my account. That way other local parents trying to arrange events with their kids and my kids can still message me. But I have 1 post with a brief explanation why I'm off the site, and that's it. No info, no profile picture, etc..

My grandparents would eat pig's feet, most of the internal organs of various animals, gibbets, chitlins, and a whole bunch of other stuff. So yeah, the ancestor argument doesn't hold for most people.

Good point.

But can't one argue that a lot of violent anarchists were acting in self-defense, full stop? Labor movements organize first, then the owners send enforcers to beat and kill them, then the labor movements fight back. Or protestors are peaceful, then they get hit with tear gas and bullets and they riot, and then the state declares that it suppressed a violent revolution. But in fact the violence was self-defense.

Am I wrong? I am willing to be educated.

I disagree with "To drift toward the alt-right you need to already be an asshole so I don't have high hope.". The people I knew that drifted that way became assholes along the way, but didn't start as assholes first.

I guess the distinction isn't that important, but I'm defending two of my brothers who started as political conservatives, dove into alt-right crap, and then jumped back a few years later and have anarchist leanings now.

I disagree, I have some friends that are former neo-nazis and relatives that were drifting on that path and then stopped. On their own, separate from the hate groups, they came to understand that the alienation and helplessness they felt were real but women, non-whites, and immigrants were not the cause.

"My life sucks, I have no career prospects, I'm lonely, and I have no romantic prospects!" All true.

"And I didn't do anything wrong!" Mostly true - we can talk about the work most girls are taught to do to maintain their real life social connections that most boys are not taught, and how it makes it harder for you to avoid loneliness and find romantic prospect.

"And it's all the fault of the feminists, blacks, Jews, Mexicans, people mooching social services, and liberals!" All false. The people causing your real problems want you to hate the feminists, blacks, and so forth because it keeps your attention off them. The real problem is abuse of power by the rich. Global wealth is at record highs - the money to pay you a decent income with benefits with a woman working to your right and a Mexican working to your left exists, they just don't want to share. In the 19th century people used to say "I sold my soul to the company store." Today we have the same system, it's just nationalized - a collection of banks somewhere owns most of us.

Immigrants are a scapegoat to distract people from the reality that global total wealth is at a historic high but the wealthiest people's share is at an even higher historic high and working class share is declining.

The writer lumps all anarchism together with violent anarchists. My understanding is that there are now and have been for decades thousands of anarchist groups that were non-violent.

Isn't her argument as silly as lumping in someone selling vegetables they grew in their garden to help pay their medical bills in with Jeff Bezos in capitalism?

Or is it only wrong to stereotype all capitalists, and all non-capitalists are fair game?

I run Kodi without plugins, I have all of my movies ripped onto a shared hard drive.

I guess that's an unusual way to use Kodi?

Even if I was going to pirate films - which I don't - I would just download the film to the shared drive. No plugin required.

I suspect it's a lot of people that aren't technical enough to use something more secure, or not even aware that Facebook's privacy settings might (might) protect you from snooping by an ex-lover but not by access from a curious employee or law enforcement.

Fascinating. It's not often I agree with a Mormon.

To be pedantic, while I agree with what she wrote her "24 hour soreness" assertion for vasectomy recoveries is incorrect. I was sore for a few weeks, though only in actual moderate pain for about 36 hours. I'm not recommending against the policy she advocates, just clarifying.

The story could have been better as a "Choose Your Own Adventure" style.

You could have decided it was unethical to hire your friend at subsistence wages, and closed shop. Or you could hire them at good wages, and then run yourself out of business. One of your early employees could get hurt in a terrible knitting-needle accident, and you could kick them to the curve and move on or cover their medical expenses... and go out of business. You could refuse to outsource your production, and then run yourself out of business. Or your competitor could negotiate a deal with BabyMart and BabyCo to only carry their products, and then you go out of business. Or you could outsource your production, but once you learned about the terrible working conditions overseas you try to make it right and treat your employees better, and with the added costs... you go out of business.

In other words, it's a game where all of the players who have a conscience or grow a conscience along the way will eventually get beaten by the players that don't. Call it "Survival of the Least Ethical".

Interesting article, thanks for sharing.

I learned a few things about the Spanish revolution and the Chinese Communist revolution through what the guy wrote.

While I agree with most of the article, I read the paper with the $29 trillion figure in the bank bailouts. The $29 trillion were artificially low interest loans that were repaid.

Say you want to borrow $100 and a bank will loan it to you in return for $115 in repayment and the Federal Reserve loan it to you for $100.50 in repayment. You borrow from the Federal Reserve and then repay the loan. Then the bailout amount is effectively $14.50 - the amount saved by not borrowing from a bank. The bailout amount is not $100.50.

Don't get me wrong, the financial industry bailouts in 2007-2010 were criminal. Many banks would have gone out of business if they couldn't get the Federal Reserve's low interest credit, and of course they should have.

But it's incorrect to write the headlines as though the Federal Reserve just gave domestic and foreign banks 29 trillion dollars and never got any of it back.

My own experience roughly mirrors this. I'm happier now that I'm off Facebook and Twitter.

I've been trying to explain this same thing to my wife and kids, but they basically live their lives around Netflix, Youtube, and social media. It makes me want to scream - I try to point out that less screen time will probably have better results, but it has no effect.

Yeah, I noticed that. The Tangled Repunzel, Frozen Elsa and Anna, Princess and the Frog Tiana, and Brave Merida no longer need a man to do everything important in their life. But they all end their film with servants and high class status.

The person that sold it to me said it's an unusually heavy food and small portions go a long way. She said most new customers complain when they see the size of the platter and then complain how stuffed they are when they finish.

That's spectacular. I just ran it on my two machines. Now if only I could login to the government and run the same command.

I'm sympathetic to the perspective that voting is meaningful. We're taught that in school and it's an implicit assumption in mainstream media.

My formal education covered trigonometry, geometry, Shakespeare, diagramming sentences, the Civil War, the Roman Empire, and World War 2 in elaborate detail. It probably had less than two weeks of content, total, on the Civil Rights movement, the labor movement, the women's suffrage movement (which by definition accomplished its goals without voting rights), and so forth. And anarchist philosophy and political theory were not mentioned at all. We read 1984 and Animal Farm in class but were never told - our teachers probably didn't even know - he was an anarcho-communist.

So even as one of those highly educated liberal elites at age 35, most of the ideas that are common on this site were alien to me. Is it any surprise I believed in voting as the primary instrument of change?