Evergreen Toot:
Where the fuck is my tape measure?

I mean, I don't think there needs to be discourse about it. Baristas should be allowed to wear whatever hand lotion they like. It's just not a sensory experience I enjoy.

I don't love when the lid of my coffee smells like Bath & Body Works lotion

Mom said she spent the day reading and listening to Zizek. She asked what I think of him and I said basically that he's inconsistent but he gets it right sometimes and I like his philosophy more than his approach to Marxism. I said I prefer Varoufakis on that and she said that she just watched him interview Zizek and she liked him too.

This is the political equivalent of the time I found out Dad was listening to my Marilyn Manson CDs in the car.

I'm watching Rust tutorials and this guy has some LLM code assistant running in VSCode and it's making it a nightmare to look at. I have no idea how people do that, it's like having an imbecile with a second keyboard constantly trying to finish your sentences incorrectly.

It's one thing to celebrate labor and to commend hard-working people for doing thankless, dangerous, and demeaning work. No one should have to be ashamed of what they do for a living. But it's another thing to witness the reality of a dangerous and demeaning industry and then, without the imagination of labor reform, campaign for the preservation and expansion of these jobs.

"We condition people to tolerate evil for convenience when they could have convenience _without_ evil."

I think this is what always made me uncomfortable about the Mike Rowe "Dirty Jobs" mentality. It's pro-worker at first glance, celebrating the people who "make civilized life possible for the rest of us." And pragmatically speaking, it is true that dirty jobs are necessary. But many of the jobs that he champions simply _should not exist_ in the form that they do.

But if you teach people implicitly that compromising their morals will improve their material conditions, even at risk to their safety (or, in some cases, their "soul") then you are preparing a lot of them to take that deal when the going gets tough.

Leftism rejects this idea, positing that cooperation is actually better than even the most morally compromised form of competition.

Fascism, however, feeds on it by offering impossible comfort through dehumanizing compromise.

You can see it in the median attitude towards crime. Sure, people care when folks get hurt, but they care a lot more when someone is trying to "get a leg up on them by compromising their morals." They resent criminals for "cheating" at life, breaking the rules that the rest of us have struggled to follow and being rewarded for it. They hate the thief who steals their neighbor's car not because they love their neighbor, but because they could have stolen that car a hundred times and didn't.

We condition people to tolerate evil for convenience when they could have convenience _without_ evil. But that doesn't play into the ruling class ideology. It's important for the hegemon to instill the idea that exploitation (and therefor incredible wealth extraction) is necessary for "civilized life" to continue.