“Before you start, are you looking for solutions, or are you looking for someone to listen?”

This is an essential relationship skill/concept. Learn it and watch all your relationships improve.

You also do it alone.

People generally used to live with their extended families.

The tasks you’re describing were generally spread out between 4-8 grown-ass adults.

It’s an allegory for STDs.

Yep. The Romans fucked themselves sideways doing this a few times. You can have all the soldiers or you can have some farmers and skilled laborers. You can’t have both.

Imagine Vietnam-era US, but it was willing to sacrifice every warm body within its borders to win.

Like the US, I think Russia is on a collision course with failure. But they’re going to take it a lot farther before waving a white flag. So much so that it will take the country decades to recover.

And Ukraine won’t be looking too hot at that point anymore, either.

Oh, good.

Finally-- a keto-friendly beer!

Italy, but everything is made of hot dogs.

Glizzaly.

I live in Taiwan.

Can confirm that plenty of shit is slathered in cheese and/or mayo, milk is readily available at any store, there’s an absurd amount of Häagen-Dazs, and milk tea is the most commonly purchased beverage in the whole country.

Butter can be a bit scarce, though, strangely.

Aquarium keeping.

Congratulations on your $3000 salt toilet.

I dunno about you, my dude, but the only people I’ve seen fucked up by antifascists were not saying that they didn’t want to bake a gay cake.

But I’ve seen the people who didn’t want to bake a gay cake be called pieces of shit who should do better. And I think that’s just called social consequences.

This is where I tend to disagree with Marx as well.

Capital is a fantastic book full of scathing and prophetic analyses of capitalism and its innate degradation of value and connection.

The Communist Manifesto is a book with some good ideas but some implementation that I find flawed. And that’s not a knock on Marx-- critiquing problems is a significantly easier prospect than offering solutions.

But a lot of Marx’s proposals for the implementation of Communism are rooted in authoritarianism, even if their end goal is the dissolution of the state and capital. Also, for an ideology versed in the formation and interdependence of worker communities, the Day of the Rope is kind of antithetical to establishing solidarity and mostly serves, I believe, as masturbatory schadenfreude.

But hey, I’m willing to fix some of the stuff that doesn’t work instead of throwing more fuel into the machine that over-harvests people and our planet to the point of destruction.

I really like this nuanced take, btw. Thanks for posting it.

Tell that to anarchocommunists.

I’m sure it will be news to them that they will want to hear.

The Wheels On the Bus on loop and full blast is part of my shock and awe strategy.

Taiwan’s position is no longer that it is the rightful ruler of China. That notion died with Chiang Kai-shek and nobody with a shred of a brain truly believes it.

The PRC won the fight over who “legitimate China” is when the UN gave them the seat for China. Also, one of these is an international superpower and the other is Taiwan.

This mostly correct.

But the US isn’t responsible for Taiwan’s increased interest in independence. Taiwan is.

After the Sunflower Movement and witnessing what happened to HK, young Taiwanese are overwhelmingly in favor of independence. So much so that independence has become all but stated as the platform of the DPP. The KMT is now the pro-unification party, but outside of the last mid-terms, they have been getting slaughtered in elections and had to tone down their pro-China rhetoric.

Status quo is definitely still the overall majority, but that is going to change with demographics and the next generation overwhelmingly favor independence.

As they should. China was not the first owner of Taiwan, and over the course of Taiwan’s history, their control of the island was relatively short. This is not even speaking of the Indigenous Taiwanese who are always left out of the conversation about Taiwan and have never been citizens of China or had Chinese heritage.

It also “arbitrarily” has its own currency, government, military, flag, infrastructure, foreign policy, trade deals, etc.

And anybody who knows the history of Taiwan and doesn’t perceive it to be an independent nation is willfully ignorant.

I love everything else about island life.

Except the fucking roaches.

I’m getting some cats this weekend and I hope they “help” my problem.

I now live in a climate with HUGE roaches.

I grew up in a climate where they were rare. I never saw a roach in-person until I was in my 20s.

For the first year in my current apartment, it was rare for me to see a roach. Maybe an odd one every once in a while.

Now, I get multiple every time it rains. Which sucks on its own. But, they’ve all taken to the same habit of crawling up the back of my couch and staring at me 3 inches away from my face to say hello.

When this happens, I transcend beyond fear and anger and enter a blackout rampage mode. Move all my furniture. Couch cushions. Hunting until I’m absolutely certain that every single one of them is dead.

I’ve bought drain covers. I’ve bought roach traps. I’ve cleaned my house top-to-bottom. I’ve checked the seals on my door and windows. They’re nowhere in sight on a dry day, but every time it rains, they’re fucking back.

It’s genuinely starting to fuck with my head, because whenever I see peripheral movement out of the corner of my eye in my apartment, I think it’s a roach. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. Are those a pair of little antennae poking out from behind my couch, or am I imagining it? I don’t know until I’ve done yet another sweep.

It’s harder to fall asleep. I keep having brief bouts of imagination wbere bugs are crawling and swarming all over me. I constantly do visual sweeps of my apartment. I can feel my stress level rising on rainy days. I feel like I’m losing my mind.

I fucking hate roaches.

Fart.