There’s this old effortpost explaining it all: https://hexbear.net/post/56333

Because the “middle class” is a fictitious category that everyone from people struggling to stay above the poverty line to literal millionaires think they belong to. It’s what “respectable” people are, the small landholders and people who aspire to own land.

It was cynically created by encouraging suburban land ownership among certain privileged (white) working class demographics, and later reinforced by encouraging tying small amounts of stock ownership into pensions or workers’ benefits. It’s a way of making workers mistakenly see their own material interests as being aligned with the ruling class’s, and insulating them against reforms that would benefit them directly at the cost of meaning less value for the meager property they’ve acquired.

The head of reddit’s censorship team is literally a CIA alumni. An extremely active leftist sub that wasn’t self-defeatingly sectarian or a captured radlib tendency like the v**shites, and that terminally online enough to be shaping discourse in general wasn’t something they could tolerate it.

I have the perfect recipe for exactly that sort of thing: get extra firm tofu, slice short ways across the brick into slices maybe 1cm thick (I actually just halve it, then halve the half, then halve that as well, because that gives a clear visual indicator and gets them all roughly even), lightly press those slices by hand, then stack them and cut them into thin strips. Fry these on medium high in a pan with some oil, topped with mix of salt, sugar (a small amount, maybe half a teaspoon), ginger, and garlic, with or without additional chopped aromatics like onions, fresh garlic, ginger root, etc, stirring regularly once you can see them starting to brown on the sides because it’s a pain to flip these strips compared to larger cubes so just continuously poking at and flipping them is needed to get them done evenly. Once they’ve got a golden brown finish to both sides they’re ready to mix into whatever.

If you can’t get them all touching the metal in the pan, do it in two batches, because they won’t get a good finish on the outside without direct contact with the pan/hot oil.

the setting makes the mechs out to be ancient storied machines that no one knows how to build anymore, passed down through generations of space feudalism and kept barely functional, but they all look like freshly mass produced clean 1980’s angular space robots. they should have like clan banners and family names and engravings and retrofit low-tech parts and stuff if the lore is meant to be at all meaningful.

I think some of the early novels did play into a little of that, although not that creatively, and then the setting moved into a sort of renaissance where they were producing new mechs en masse. It also never quite got to the “mechs are relics” state, because even before that renaissance there were still factories churning them out and standing armies of them.

It’s pretty incoherent, overall.

“Conservative” is just a subgroup of liberal at this point, since there’s not a monarchist status quo for them to cleave to like “conservatives” in the 19th and early 20th centuries could in some places (note: this gets weird in liberal monarchies like the UK where the monarchist dictatorship is just an accepted part of liberalism). “Conservative” is just the sub-category of liberal that’s defined by being even more racist, chauvinist, and extremist than is typical of mainstream liberalism.

It’s not a binary, it’s not even a spectrum, it’s two competing blocs of one hard-right ideology.

I don’t think 30 year olds should act or eat like this.

Look, Americans have very specific dietary needs, like hummingbirds. Without a regular meal of bread that’s 50% corn syrup by mass and covered in thickened fruit juice with extra corn syrup and a little bit of fat and protein to further amplify the effects, they cannot sustain the exertion of pushing their lifted SUVs along Fred Flintstone style on their way to and from work. The average American burns over 20,000 calories on their typical 4 hour daily commute and the entire food economy is oriented around supporting this activity.

Lmao, I didn’t even stop to think about the problems with that before rejecting it out of hand. I could imagine some sort of convection camp stove thing running off a propane tank, like a glorified grill with a fan in it, but gas ranges are demanding and risky enough and require ventilation that some shitty little countertop appliance wouldn’t have. Even if the build quality was high enough that it wasn’t a constant fire/explosion hazard, it would be dumping carbon monoxide everywhere.

I’d sooner go for a propane wok stand/burner if I was going to mess with gas tbh. I like tools I can actively and directly use instead of just a box I tell to do something and then trust to work.

I just happen to have been given an air fryer despite me repeatedly saying “aren’t those just shitty tiny ovens? the hype seems like a meme from people who can’t cook,” and deciding to give it a fair try. So far my cynicism seems to be validated: it’s not granularly controllable like an oven and I can’t operate it directly like with a cast iron pan on a stove, it’s literally just set a temperature and cook time and trust that the inscrutable box is doing it right.

My conclusion was that the air fryer, at least the one I have, just doesn’t get hot enough to get the effect I want. Doing this same process with the final step in a pan with a little oil works extremely well, though: boil with salt and vinegar, drain, toss in spices and oil, and fry on medium-high heat (hot enough that vegetable oil starts putting out little wisps of smoke, but not hot enough that it actually starts smoking) turning regularly until they look done, which gets the texture both inside and out perfect in a way that is frustratingly hard to get with sweet potatoes. I guess my next experiment would be trying to bake them for a short time at 450 or so in a real oven to see if that’ll do it, because 400 just wasn’t enough to get the outside good without messing up the internal consistency.

I will say boiling the wedges/sticks like this and then using the air fryer is still better than just baking them directly from raw, even though I wasn’t fully satisfied with the results. It’s just using a pan instead of the air fryer worked better.

Experiment 2 - 10 minutes at 400 degrees: meh, it’s better but still inferior to frying them in a pan. That’s the last of the fries I had prepared, so no more experiments right now.

Experiment 1 - 5 minutes at 400 degrees: nope, not even a little bit browned or crisped outside. Tried one, and it was still good because it had been boiled for 10 minutes in a salt and vinegar brine and lightly tossed in garlic, ginger, salt, and pepper, but the texture was 100% that of a lightly boiled potato.

Experiment 1b - 5 more minutes at 400 degrees, same batch: a little browning in spots, still squishy outside, getting too soft inside. Do air fryers just suck? Like my impression has always been that they’re just shitty little ovens for people who want an oven to work like a microwave, and this experiment is just reinforcing this expectation so far.

Experiment 1c - 5 more minutes, same temperature, same batch: no change, they’re just getting drier and floppier. This thing sucks, why does anyone use this over a real oven or stove.

I think that historically you’d have been right about one particular type of guy, the chauvinist libertine who was broadly pro-liberation in general but in a very selfish and fickle way where he must be the most liberated and coddled and no one may ever tell him no, but that over the past 10-15 years that type of guy has almost entirely been subsumed into the foaming morass of secular fascists and hypocritical theocrats. Yesterday’s chauvinist libertine misogynists are today’s fascist treatlords who are easily led about by anyone telling them women are threatening their personal treats and so have been converted entirely into rabid reactionaries.

The IMF and World Bank are single, centralized institutions that (from my perspective right now) are making an unforced error.

As much as neoliberals can be cynical, calculated, and cruel, it’s easy to forget that their economic system is a dogmatic cult that’s irrational, flawed, and built on materially false tenets. They’re not magic robots doing paperclip optimization, they’re cruel people dogmatically following an earnest belief in a deeply flawed school of economic thought written by cranks with ulterior motives.

looking for good guys in WW1 is probably not going to end well

The Red Army fighting the invasion by the Entente who wanted the Whites back in power so Russia would return to the war. That’s technically not in WWI but it was both contemporaneous to it, related to it, and involved powers currently fighting in it.

I find myself describing it as a cold and crystalized rage - icy, sharp, and still, lying beneath the surface. We have far since passed the point where frantic anger became appropriate, since any sort of moral event horizon was passed, but it all has to be frozen and put away, still present and painful but constrained enough that we can still function.

I read it when I was a depressed ball of repression and anxiety in my early 20s, and in retrospect I’m half convinced that the book was an elaborate shitpost to get the sort of person who wants to read a book on manipulating people to instead read a bunch of old arabic parables and ultimately get indirectly called a dumbass in the final chapter for thinking they could learn how to manipulate people and wield power from a book, which also praises Mao and the CPC’s strategic ability during the revolution.

It will never not be funny/infuriating that literally everyone resorted to human wave tactics except for the army that’s racistly stereotyped as using them.

As an aside, it is genuinely fucked how things like ad-hoc militias in the early days of the war deciding to fight doomed holding actions to buy their families and neighbors time to evacuate despite not being able to source enough guns to arm everyone who was willing to actively and knowingly sacrifice their own lives in the hopes of saving everyone they know and care about gets spun into racist tales about an entire army throwing unarmed men into a meatgrinder, and how this seeps into portrayals of successful attacks carried out by well equipped veteran units who’d spent days training for it ahead of time like the river crossing in Enemy at the Gates (which IRL was an unopposed action from a well equipped and extremely prepared veteran unit).

100%. There’s a pervasive sort of belief that laws are discrete, literal things carved into the very ontology of existence instead of fuzzy guidelines enforced or ignored at the arbitrary whims of the legal system which also has no actual obligation to know the laws and whose will is still considered legitimate even when it is directly breaking the law or making up imaginary ones that don’t exist but some dipshit cop thinks they do. Like it’s just straight up these civic cult brainworms that legislatures are doing some sort of magic ritual to create Law and this then becomes some sort of real and true binding principle to be unfailingly carried out by reliable enforcers.

Dial up that belief even further and it becomes like the civic cult’s version of numerology and prophesy through analyzing the holy texts, where they believe so wholly in legal literalism that they start to think it’s a magic system and they’re wizards who can exploit its literalness and nature of being fundamental to reality to their own advantage.