At the time the EU was first floating the idea of the incandescent light bulb ban, LED technology wasn’t nearly as good as it is now. They wanted to replace it wit CFLs, which suck ass, contain mercury, and are multiple times more expensive than light bulbs. I have seen a suggestion, years ago, that this was a 5D chess move by some unnamed EU aparatchik who wanted to kickstart LED efficiency research, but I don’t believe it - if it were true, we wouldn’t hear the end of it. As it happens, they lucked into a mostly superior technology, and if not for that luck we’d have been stuck with expensive toxic CFLs.
(Although there’s still some fuckery with how often the bulb-equivalent LEDs need replacing - the built-in ones keep their promise of working indefinitely, in my experience.)
I haven’t been to the US, so I didn’t have the displeasure of encountering a low-flow toilets or showerheads, so I can’t tell how much of the gains in water usage is negated by the fact that people have to flush multiple times or take longer showers because ow the low goddamn flow. I also remember @dryiffsrevitalizingtailholetonic having Opinions about “efficient” ACs that need replacing every other year, and @vriskakinnieaynrand had things to say about dishwashers that need multiple runs to work.
As the combined Clark-Heinlein adage goes, sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice, and with a track record of random bullshit like this, it’s obvious for me that the psyop du jour wasn’t created with best interest of stove users in mind.
I’m never going to stop being mad about being forced to have a piece of shit toilet that constantly clogged (like, you would have to use the plunger almost every time you used it and definitely every time you pooped) despite not being in an area with water shortages. (Yeah, of course you can buy a fancy toilet that actually works for substantially more than the old model of toilet that didn’t clog, but TFW you are poor.)
“Al Gore clogged my toilet” is a very direct harm, you know?
This is such a weird topic to turn into a culture war thing.
The people turning it into a culture war thing are the ones who are trying to get the state to mandate the thing. There’s no war if different people can just make different decisions as they see fit without needing to coordinate on one solution or even being aware of what solutions people who aren’t them are going with.
I cannot overemphasize how much I appreciated that my husband was into gunpla as a kid and we’re both just constantly delighted to be in a relationship with someone else who likes Gundam.
Like, not saying a relationship where only one person is into Gundam can’t work, but it sure does help if you both are into Gundam.
My favorite thing about getting a post massively reblogged is seeing how many people have negative tagging systems. I don’t mean “negative” in the sense of “bad”, I just mean that instead of tagging something as X, they tag it as not-Y.
Like you’ll make a post about how spoons were invented in the 1720s in an ill-fated attempt to settle an argument between four of the five popes, and it gets reblogged and someone tags it “#not naruto”.
And it’s like, you’re not wrong. That post has nothing to do with Naruto! But you can’t help but feel proud your post got selected as one of the few non-naruto posts worthy of being included on their clearly heavily Naruto-themed blog.
To spice up everyone’s Tumblr experience we should all start adding random ‘not x’ tags to anything we reblog.
for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal
before it was like, “what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?”
and now it’s like, “ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it’s pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we’ve normalized this experience”
Instagram and TikTok have successfully created the Torment Nexus from Jim Carrey’s iconic work, “Don’t put people in the Torment Nexus”
We need to abolish the police and then create a subtly different type of police
Abolish the police, by which I mean make incremental reforms to the current system
After the revolution there will be no need for police, so when I say “abolish the police” i actually mean “incrementally build class consciousness”
All serious crimes can be prevented with welfare except the ones caused by legitimacy, therefore we just need to turn the dial to 100% welfare and 0% legitimacy and it should be good
The police are just another gang, so once we revoke their social license and create a power vacuum, we can stop worrying about gangs once and for all
Abolishing the police isn’t an end state, it’s a process of perpetual revolution
I get this is a shitpost, but you left out the libertarian contingent:
Abolish the police, by which I mean privatize them into a bunch of competing private security/”dispute resolution” firms (the AnCap take)
Abolish the police, and let gun-toting citizens just blast any criminals (KulakRevolt et al.)
And then a wild “trad” warrior joins the battle:
Abolish the police, and wind law enforcement back to before Sir Robert Peel introduced his “bobbies” in 1829 — night watchmen, private prosecutions, et cetera…
hello! on your youth rights post, i wanted to ask what you propose as an alternative to cps? i agree that cps fucking sucks and is definitely included in acab. some of them care but i've also seen some treat kids like livestock and the whole system is awful. often they won't do anything and will ignore follow-ups. i have had a friend who called cps and their parents were just told to not leave physical marks, basically giving them instructions on how to not be caught being abusers. i've also had a classmate who came to me for advice who couldn't call cps because he would be beaten and removed from school if he did. this kid was in his first year of real school and had been "homeschooled" by his parents, who basically used him to take care of the younger ones and never taught him anything. i myself tutored him and set him up with kahn academy so he could have a chance of passing ninth grade.
i was also abused by my parents, but they left no lasting physical marks and never sexually abused- their main abuse was severe psychological and verbal abuse, along with emotional neglect. as a younger kid (before 12 years old) i was far too guilty about everything and constantly told i had a duty to be loyal to my parents (while they threatened a child, me, with jail) because they brought me into the world and "took care of" me. when i was older and tried to speak, nobody believed me and my parents told everyone i was/am a crazy teenager. this is very recent and still ongoing.
the best alternative I have heard of is to create safe and supportive spaces that kids and teens can live no questions asked and cannot be forced to leave, but even so, physically getting to a location like that and being able to get out of the guilt and shame is extremely difficult for younger children and some teens. where i am now that would be a lifesaver, but it would not help (for example) 10-year-old me.
Most of my reaction to your question is Japanese Meme Politician:
ALT
This is an extremely hard problem because every sort of proposed fix is going to have people in charge of it. “Safe and supportive spaces” do not run themselves. There’s a large chance such a thing winds up being CPS 2. Also, child abusers will disproportionately apply to positions in charge of safe and supportive spaces, and similar positions with power over children, as seen with the frequency of child abuse by public school teachers.
In America, this is aggravated further by “disparate impact” law where trying to filter out applicants with weird red flags for likely child abuse is presumptively illegal, because it would filter out disproportionately many members of protected classes.
If my parents had been abusive, I imagine my approach when I was 10 would probably have been to flee to a different household of my extended family (grandma, uncle, and so on) and beg for sanctuary there. The nearest thing I have to a vaguely constructive proposal is more power to grandmas and uncles.
Some people have sufficiently high verbal fluency, self-awareness, conversational control, and other nice traits that they are able to reject the framing and attack the premises of the kind of question McClellan poses here.
For everyone else, “inferior” is the more correct of the two options, and people like McClellan are a reason why it’s incumbent on you to tolerate a group of people being called “inferior”.
ALT
