chapotraphouse

But what is the relationship between this vision and democracy? Imagine you are a member of the two-thirds of U.S. workers who work in the local service economy—a statistic cited by the authors—who get up every morning to clean houses, cut hair, apply cosmetic treatments, service appliances, drive for Uber, manage medical appointments, or answer angry customer requests. Who has the most money to spend on these services? Those who have much more than you. You are constantly confronted with people who are living in abundance, who have fridges stacked with fresh produce, who drive silent e-vehicles, who overlook green lawns. From where you sit, the problem is not that there is not enough material wealth around but that you are shut out; that after working long hours, juggling care work and several jobs, you are still living in scarcity while others are dwelling in abundance.

This is the vantage of most people. To build a new political order, Democrats must win back the large numbers of working people who stayed home in the last election and win over the losers of Trump’s shock therapy. Will they be mobilized around a happy go lucky vision of green abundance where all distributional and power conflicts have disappeared? I doubt it.

...

Having researched China’s market reforms for many years, I can say that it’s baffling to argue China’s success in building out critical infrastructure is simply a result of a combination of power abuses and the absence of regulations and “debating with judges.” There are many countries in the world that have authoritarian governments and loose environmental and building regulations. None of them has managed to build high-speed rail at breakneck speed.

In fact, a quick search on the internet is enough to find a detailed study by the World Bank on how China managed to build its high-speed rail so quickly and efficiently. Among the key factors are: a 15-year plan that lays out long-term goals and was followed up with five-year plans to specify construction projects and revise goals based on past progress (these have all been upward revisions); special-purpose construction and management companies that are joint ventures between central and provincial governments; coordination among rail manufacturers, research institutions, and engineering centers; managers with clear responsibility and significant performance-based compensation that incentivizes them to stay for whole projects; a high degree of standardization in design and procedures; and a steady stream of projects to enable the creation of a “capable, competitive supply industry.”

Weber is ultimately a liberal, but I'll take a 15 year plan lib who understands China and isn't blinded by the beautiful glow of their lawn over a fucking aboondance lib any day.

Her book on China and shock therapy was great btw

Here's one I think not many people think about, factory or industrial cycles, as in, they're used to get people and some goods around factories or industrial sites. In the open world these are often called transport bicycles, sort of like the middle step between your average bicycle and a proper cargo bike.

Transport cycles usually come with some sort of internal gear hub with 7 or 8 gears, mostly using the tried and true Shimano Nexus. Industrial or Factory bicycles tend to be a hell of a lot more utilitarian and built for shorter distances, with many of them being single speeds or maybe a 3 gear nexus in there. They're usually quite heavy, pictured one comes in at 19kg which is a lot for a non-ebike, but do sport some increased carry weights - 25kg for that front basket there, 140kg in total (so 120kg of load capacity including all human and all cargo), allthough I imagine this is often disregarded with very few problems.

https://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/jhamlin/4111/MarxReadings/Estranged%20Labour,%20Marx,%201844.htm

Every self-estrangement of man from himself and nature is manifested in the relationship he sets up between other men and himself and nature. Thus, religious self-estrangement is necessarily manifested in the relationship between layman and priest, or, since we are dealing here with the spiritual world, between layman and mediator, etc. In the practical, real world, self-estrangement can manifest itself only in the practical, real relationship to other men. The medium through which estrangement progresses is itself a practical one. So through estranged labour man not only produces his relationship to the object and to the act of production as to alien and hostile powers; he also produces the relationship in which other men stand to his production and product, and the relationship in which he stands to these other men. Just as he creates his own production as a loss of reality, a punishment, and his own product as a loss, a product which does not belong to him, so he creates the domination of the non-producer over production and its product. Just as he estranges from himself his own activity, so he confers upon the stranger and activity which does not belong to him.

The party he's talking about, which split off from the Red Party over Ukraine, states in its own words,

Norwegian weapons in Ukraine contribute to lengthening the suffering by delaying necessary peace negotiations. Peace and Justice wants to spend the 180 billion kroner that the parties in parliament want to spend on continuing the war in Ukraine, on improving people's lives rather than taking more of them. The war began due to NATO's goal of incorporating Ukraine as a member, and can be stopped by abandoning this goal.

"Putinists."

Check the Mastodon user's bio,

[...] Green Party. [...] Library socialist.

Welp, guess it figures that this is the type of person who can somehow reconcile an ideology he probably only heard about from a YouTube video by a certain Trinidadian fellow, with being a member of a green capitalist party that wants Norway to join the EU (for the sake of green capitalists' profit).

There is an incredible amount of conspiracy theories surrounding cars and whenever the discussion or analysis of how in gods name did we get to so many people believing in them so many smart people do a lot of thinking and just entirely blank what, to me, is the most obvious entrypoint for this sort of thing.

I'm not talking about the crank shit that is also car, like the idea that the jewish lizard people are hiding the water based engine that can drive around the earth on 500ml of liquid here, but the explicitly carbrained ones that never seem to be called out as conspiracy theories despite hitting all the marks.

How many people do you know that think whatever the authority on traffic light timings is just making them bad on purpose to annoy every car driver? Like there's a big red "make car traffic flow good" button in the central control unit everybody involved just refuses to press or even talk about despite literally every document around this topic clearly lining out how they're optimizing all this shit for optimal car throughput at every turn?

The idea that there isn't enough parking that goes full steam into being aggrieved about not being able to park in the 4th dimension because you can't park 5 cars directly infront of a storefront that's about one car wide and somehow this is again the doing of the shadowy cabal that runs the municipality to annoy every car driver.

The idea that for some unbeknownst reason every western government is in cahoots to build roads like shit so they deterioate within a year or two, on purpose, to...annoy car drivers, again.

The idea that one more lane will fix it, where there is a magic solution to congestion, despite that having never worked, decades of scientific evidence that it doesn't and also again begs the question as how do you figure every level of government everywhere just refuses to do the one magic thing that fixes it all.

Your average carbrain sits at a traffic light, see's people go the other way and figures the government is gangstalking him, specifically. The reasons entirely unclear, but some sort of entity out there is dead set on making you miserable by making you wait. That's the common thread here, it's being annoyed and then figuring out this is targeting you, specifically, completely ignoring how much the built enviroment you're using is made to serve the cars despite all the very much published evidence around it and instead believing there's some conspiracy going on that hides the magic solution that would make it all better. It's all conspiracy theories, except enough people believe in them that it's just mainstream politics now. Wonder where else we might find this phenomenon.

I bet the Pentagon had a big bash planned and everything when their engineering corps brought them the bad news. Then they had to spin the sour grapes.

Source: Vibes

That's it. That's the post.

ACAB forever. AmeriKKKan pigs might shoot you and laugh about it, but Brit cops will gangstalk you, shoot you, then lie through their teeth for no reason than to prove they can do it.

1. fucker has my dream job

2. see 1

shocked, appalled, betrayed, dismayed

Post them now. Maybe in the future things will start, dare I say, ~~happening~~.

“They’re replacing Steak n Shake with a halal restaurant.

Somebody get your mans, this dude is fucking dying holy shit lmaoooo