Tootfinder

I had 12 weeks of parental leave for each of my children. (Six of those were paid by my company, and 6 by Washington State. In the US, this might come across as bragging but functional countries will be shocked at how little it is.) My partner fed them, because we had the privilege of being able to breast feed, so I took care of diapers, tummy time, and what other things I could.
I learned about elimination communication (EC). We used cloth diapers, for ecological reasons but also because they can help with potty training later. With EC, it was relatively easy. I actually only had to change dirty diapers a few times. I was available, so I could pay attention to our babies. I could learn their body language. Both of them rarely cried because we knew what they needed before they had to cry about it.
When I was forced back to work, the EC thing fell off. We continued to use cloth diapers for a while with our oldest, but it became too hard with our youngest. We had to switch to disposable diapers because of the overhead.
There have been so many wasteful things we've done because we don't have space to do the right thing. Having kids is both isolating and overwhelming. To maintain sanity, you just have to take short cuts when you don't have time or help.
Before kids, we used to really enjoy cooking together. We would start from basic ingredients and work our way up. We made pad thai, squishing tamarind paste from pods by hand. Even after having kids, my oldest and I would collect acorns from the tree down the street and crack them together. The other day we all cracked acorns we had collected for the first time since moving over here (and I made some Dotori-muk. We've also started making bread together again.
Kids really love making and processing food. There's a sensory element to it, which, if you don't have kids, is actually a really big thing kids need. But there's also a social element to making food together. They just behave better when we do things like that. It's almost like there's some kind of evolutionary incentive for kids to *want* to help. Go figure.
I've really been wanting to make seitan as we try to reduce how much meat we eat in our house. Even that meat consumption is partially about convenience. It's relatively cheap and easy to throw a bag of chicken wings in air fryer, or some ground beef in with pearl couscous in the instant pot, and just have low effort food home made food. My partner is vegan. I used to eat mostly vegan at home and only eat meat on occasion, usually eating out. But it just takes more mental energy to cook without meat. It's an easy protein, and our kids are picky.
These threads, and a few others, all connect back to a single thing. When we can slow down, we can be more careful and thoughtful. We can be mindful. We can make decisions that are better for the environment, that account for climate change. When we are under pressure, when we are tired and overworked, it's just harder or impossible to be careful and mindful... and that's exactly the point.
At a time when the survival of our species depends on our ability to slow down and be mindful, we are more stressed and overwhelmed than ever. Because, if we had a chance to slow down and think, if we could make good choices, we would make choices that would destroy the industries at the core of the global order. To slow down, as we did at the beginning of COVID, is catastrophic for "the economy." Of course it is.
When an industry runs out of room to expand by driving efficiency, it must increase demand. If demand is already fulfilled, it must create waste. The more pressure there is on the population, the worse decisions people make, the more they waste. Waste is the point. We are in an existential conflict. If we do not destroy this system, if we cannot simply slow down and think, we will be destroyed by it.
I think about the microplastics from those diapers, the methane from them rotting (not captured in the municipal biogas digester, but released directly into the environment), the little plastic containers of everything, all the opportunity costs of the carelessness inflicted on us to survive, and I wonder, "is any of this really worth my time in the office? Did I really produce so much more value doing my work than when destroyed in order to allow me to work?" Of course not, because the invisible hand, in it's infinite wisdom, has shuffled away that cost. The cost of our family thrashing is borne by society, we are a burden on everyone, while the value of my labor is internalized to the company.
How much of your "carbon footprint" should belong to your employer? There can be no capitalist solution to the climate crisis because capitalism is the crisis.
#ClimateCrisis

"""
Traditional politics of assistance and the repression of unemployment were now called into question. The need for reform became urgent.
Poverty was gradually separated from the old moral confusions. Economic crises had shown that unemployment could not be confused with indolence, as indigence and enforced idleness spread throughout the countryside, to precisely the places that had previously been considered home to the purest and most immediate forms of moral life. This demonstrated that poverty did not solely fall under the order of the fault: ‘Begging is the fruit of poverty, which in turn is the consequence of accidents in the production of the earth or in the output of factories, of a rise in the price of basic foodstuffs, or of growth of the population, etc.’ Indigence became a matter of economics.
But it was not contingent, nor was it destined to be suppressed forever. There would always be a certain quantity of poverty that could never be effaced, a sort of fatal indigence that would accompany all forms of society until the end of time, even in places where all the idle were employed: ‘The only paupers in a well governed state must be those born in indigence, or those who fall into it by accident.’ This backdrop of poverty was somehow inalienable: whether by birth or accident, it formed an inevitable part of society. The state of lack was so firmly entrenched in the destiny of man and the structure of society that for a long time the idea of a state without paupers remained inconceivable: in the thought of philosophers, property, work and indigence were terms linked right up until the nineteenth century.
This portion of poverty was necessary because it could not be suppressed; but it was equally necessary in that it made wealth possible. Because they worked but consumed little, a class of people in need allowed a nation to become rich, to release the value of its fields, colonies and mines, making products that could be sold throughout the world. An impoverished people, in short, was a people that had no poor. Indigence became an indispensable element in the state. It hid the secret but most real life of society. The poor were the seat and the glory of nations. And their noble misery, for which there was no cure, was to be exalted:
«My intention is solely to invite the authorities to turn part of their vigilant attention to considering the portion of the People who suffer … the assistance that we owe them is linked to the honour and prosperity of the Empire, of which the Poor are the firmest bulwark, for no sovereign can maintain and extend his domain without favouring the population, and cultivating the Land, Commerce and the Arts; and the Poor are the necessary agents for the great powers that reveal the true force of a People.»
What we see here is a moral rehabilitation of the figure of the Pauper, bringing about the fundamental economic and social reintegration of his person. Paupers had no place in a mercantilist economy, as they were neither producers nor consumers, and they were idle, vagabond or unemployed, deserving nothing better than confinement, a measure that extracted and exiled them from society. But with the arrival of the industrial economy and its thirst for manpower, paupers were once again a part of the body of the nation.
"""
(Michel Foucault, History of Madness)

Is Tesla's directors dumb or the dumbest board of directors?
Tesla's board has to realize that musk is a boat anchor bringing the company down with hyperbolic bad choice piled on top of hyperbolic bad choice.
If Tesla wants to improve its position - whether measured by sales, balance sheet, income statement, or reputation it needs to drop that boat anchor and make its cars competitive against the increasingly large number of alternative, and often better, EVs from other m…

Elon Musk Could Become First Trillionaire Under New Tesla Pay Package
Tesla’s board unveiled a compensation package for the chief executive that could be worth $900 billion if he meets ambitious targets.

How George Pickens has fit in with Cowboys: 'It's only gotten better and better and better' https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6593410/2025/09/03/cowboys-george-pickens-offense-big-season/

i keep being like men arent inherently evil its the environment they were in forever that did that conservatives arent inherently evil its the environment they were in forever that did that these hood kids arent worse or more prone to doing crime than u its the environment they were in forever that did that its hard but maybe if the better things had a front attached to account for the person's background and time to grow they could change things could change things might be better they&…

TL;DR: spending money to find the cause of autism is a eugenics project, and those resources could have been spent improving accommodations for Autistic people instead.
To preface this, I'm not Autistic but I'm neurodivergent with some overlap.
We need to be absolutely clear right now: the main purpose is *all* research into the causes of autism is eugenics: a cause is sought because non-autistic people want to *eliminate* autistic people via some kind of "cure." It should be obvious, but a "cured autistic person" who did not get a say in the decision to administer that "cure" has been subjected to non-consensual medical intervention at an extremely unethical level. Many autistic people have been exceptionally clear that they don't want to be "cured," including some people with "severe autism" such as people who are nonverbal.
When we think things like "but autism makes life so hard for some people," we're saying that the difficulties in their life are a result of their neurotype, rather than blaming the society that punished & devalues the behaviors that result from that neurotype at every turn. To the extent that an individual autistic person wants to modify their neurotype and/or otherwise use aids to modify themselves to reduce difficulties in their life, they should be free to pursue that. But we should always ask the question: "what if we changed their social or physical environment instead, so that they didn't have to change themselves?" The point is that difficulties are always the product of person x environment, and many of the difficulties we attribute to autism should instead be attributed to anti-autistic social & physical spaces, and resources spent trying to "find the cause of autism" would be *much* better spent trying to develop & promote better accommodations for autism. Or at least, that's the case if you care about the quality of life of autistic people and/or recognize their enormous contributions to society (e.g., Wikipedia could not exist in anything near its current form without autistic input). If instead you think of Autistic people as gross burdens that you'd rather be rid of, then it makes sense to investigate the causes of autism so that you can eventually find a "cure."
All of that to say: the best response to lies about the causes of autism is to ask "What is the end goal of identifying the cause?" instead of saying "That's not true, here's better info about the causes."
#autism #trump
P.S. yes, I do think about the plight of parents of autistic kids, particularly those that have huge struggles fitting into the expectations of our society. They've been put in a position where society constantly bullies and devalues their kid, and makes it mostly impossible for their kid to exist without constant parental support, which is a lot of work and which is unfair when your peers get the school system to do a massive amount of childcare. But in that situation, your kid is in an even worse position than you as the direct victim of all of that, and you have a choice: are you going to be their ally against the unfair world, or are you going to blame them and try to get them to confirm enough that you can let the school system take care of them, despite the immense pain that that will provoke? Please don't come crying for sympathy if you choose the later option (and yes, helping them be able to independently navigate society is a good thing for them, but there's a difference between helping them as their ally, at their pace, and trying to force them to conform to reduce the burden society has placed on you).

One of my professors asked me today how I would balance the principle of least privilege against efficiency and ease of use in a large organization with thousands of employees.
The best answer I could come up with is that any single organization that size is an unholy abomination, and that I would move mountains to not be in that position.
Seriously, I'm sick of the question "How can this be scaled?" The better question is, "Would scaling <thing> be a net…

In 2011, I posted to our forums to explain "Why not Windows?" Our goal is not to make the most money; it's to make the best software that we can make. There are other successful platforms, but I don' t think our software would be better on any of them.
Since 2011 we've moved to different forums and the hardware hosting our archived forums died. Maybe someday I'll revive it from backups, but in the meantime it's nice that the Internet Archive still has a co…

Jets QB Justin Fields unbothered by owner's criticism amid 0-7 effort: 'Everybody knows I need to play better'

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/n…

ein noch relativ frischer Aufsatz zum italienischen Sonderweg in Sachen freier Zugang zu gemeinfreiem Kulturgut: Sappa, C., Bossi, L. Postcards from Italy – The Art of Controlling Images of Cultural Goods Better Than Copyright Could. IIC 56, 320–368 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40319-025-01565-w

Has anyone making this feature actually asked any accessibility experts and any disabled people if this is a good idea?
Because in practice this will give you terrible results, because AI can’t know what you intent do communicate with the image.
Even if it would give good results (it doesn’t and never will) and you’re too lazy to write alt text yourself, it would be better to do this on the receiving end where the disabled person could fine-tune generative alt text to their specific needs.
https://mastodon.social/@MonaApp/115406286404369048

Not interested in a debate on what ways are better or worse but it seems to me that @TheASF has a fair bit of material on "The Apache Way" which one could approach as a How-To even for projects that are not under the ASF or any other domiciling organization. It's not perfect but I'm not aware of any ASF project having the sort of nasty takeover like the Ruby affair.
OTOH, it may require the "hippie" vibe of ASF focused on consensus and community over code t…

Feel like your collection website could be better but don't know the necessary tools? A few seats left in UMaine's online course in Digital Collections and Exhibitions starting 3 Sep, which teaches  the fundamentals of getting your records in a database and putting them online https://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu

So this is weird; I picked up a new Bluetooth adapter so I could better test Meshtastic devices and my AAC-only Bluetooth headphones just work with it.
Maybe the root of my issue was just an incompatible radio, though I wouldn't have expected that to make a difference.... I dunno.
Also I think I may try to do a video of the configuration and installation of my next radio, though it'll be a couple weeks for it to be delivered.
Bonus points if I can figure out how the…

Not good at all
This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services
#aibubble

This Is How Much Anthropic and Cursor Spend On Amazon Web Services
So, I originally planned for this to be on my premium newsletter, but decided it was better to publish on my free one so that you could all enjoy it. If you liked it, please consider subscribing to support my work. Here’s $10 off the first year of annual.

Speculative politics
As an anarchist (okay, maybe not in practice), I'm tired of hearing why we have to suffer X and Y indignity to "preserve the rule of law" or "maintain Democratic norms." So here's an example of what representative democracy (a form of government that I believe is inherently flawed) could look like if its proponents had even an ounce of imagination, and/or weren't actively trying to rig it to favor a rich donor class:
1. Unicameral legislature, where representatives pass laws directly. Each state elects 3 statewide representatives: the three most-popular candidates in a statewide race where each person votes for one candidate (ranked preference voting would be even better but might not be necessary, and is not a solution by itself). Instead of each representative getting one vote in the chamber, they get N votes, where N is the number of people who voted for them. This means that in a close race, instead of the winner getting all the power, the power is split. Having 3 representatives trades off between leisure size and ensuring that two parties can't dominate together.
2. Any individual citizen can contact their local election office to switch or withdraw their vote at any time (maybe with a 3-day delay or something). Voting power of representatives can thus shift even without an election. They are limited to choosing one of the three elected representatives, or "none of the above." If the "none of the above" fraction exceeds 20% of eligible voters, a new election is triggered for that state. If turnout is less than 80%, a second election happens immediately, with results being final even at lower turnout until 6 months later (some better mechanism for turnout management might be needed).
3. All elections allow mail-in ballots, and in-person voting happens Sunday-Tuesday with the Monday being a mandatory holiday. (Yes, election integrity is not better in this system and that's a big weakness.)
4. Separate nationwide elections elect three positions for head-of-state: one with diplomatic/administrative powers, another with military powers, and a third with veto power. For each position, the top three candidates serve together, with only the first-place winner having actual power until vote switches or withdrawals change who that is. Once one of these heads loses their first-place status, they cannot get it again until another election, even if voters switch preferences back (to avoid dithering). An election for one of these positions is triggered when 20% have withdrawn their votes, or if all three people initially elected have been disqualified by losing their lead in the vote count.
5. Laws that involve spending money are packaged with specific taxes to pay for them, and may only be paid for by those specific revenues. Each tax may be opted into or out of by each taxpayer; where possible opting out of the tax also opts you out of the service. (I'm well aware of a lot of the drawbacks of this, but also feel like they'd not necessarily be worse than the drawbacks of our current system.) A small mandatory tax would cover election expenses.
6. I'm running out of attention, but similar multi-winner elections could elect panels of judges from which a subset is chosen randomly to preside in each case.
Now I'll point out once again that this system, in not directly confronting capitalism, racism, patriarchy, etc., is probably doomed to the same failures as our current system. But if you profess to want a "representative democracy" as opposed to something more libratory, I hope you'll at least advocate for something like this that actually includes meaningful representation as opposed to the current US system that's engineered to quash it.
Key questions: "Why should we have winner-take-all elections when winners-take-proportionately-to-votes is right there?" and "Why should elected officials get to ignore their constituents' approval except during elections, when vote-withdrawal or -switching is possible?"
2/2
#Democracy

Trying to decide between going with a budget ebike around $1,000 or a better model from a local shop that would be double that price.
The cheaper one is definitely within my budget, while the other option is quite a bit more that I’d like to spend…
Hoping to commute to work, 7 miles each way, both could handle that easily…
#biking

Here's a thoughtful critique of One Battle After Another, which I still enjoyed and recommend - and would quibble with some of the points here - but I agree the first act could've been handled better to avoid perpetuating quite so much the fetishization the film intends to condemn. https://

One Fetish After Another: PTA Exploits Black Women and Averts Revolution
Paul Thomas Anderson's action flick leaves much to be desired.

Pew: 62% of US parents say their child under 2 watches YouTube and 84% say their child age 2-4 does; daily use for ages 2-4 grew from 38% in 2020 to 51% in 2025 (Pew Research Center)
https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/10/08/how-parents-manage-s…

How Parents Manage Screen Time for Kids
About four-in-ten parents say they could be doing better at managing their kid’s screen time. A larger share – 58% – say they’re doing the best they can.

The fascist coalition was never going to hold. It couldn't. Fascists want everyone to be exactly the same. That's their whole thing. Leftists want diversity, so we can actually form coalitions. Fascists will always reach a point where they have to kill all the other fascists who aren't exactly like them.
Project 2025 betrayed this. It wasn't consistent. It was a jumble of different ideas that couldn't actually be implemented together. Someone gets left out. The Groypers haven't been getting what they want. Things have been moving too slowly for them. So now we get to see what happens. If they keep accelating, Trump could be forced to choose between cracking down on the far right (and destroying his coalition completely) or letting his people get killed. I hope that's a choice he has to make.
🍿
While Rome burns, go build things that help people and get other people involved in it. The way we win is by not getting involved in that mess, but rather just clearly demonstrating that we can make things better.

2025 NFL trade deadline: Nine players who could benefit from a change of scenery, including Saints Pro Bowlers

https://www.cbssports.com/nfl/news/2025-nfl-trade-deadline-biggest-tra…

Raiders Trade Pitch Lands Polarizing 11,000-Yard WR for Geno Smith https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/las-vegas-raiders/dolphins-trade-pitch-11000-yard-wr/?adt_ei=[email]

Stephen Jones says Cowboys will look for ways to improve before NFL deadline https://www.si.com/nfl/cowboys/news/dallas-cowboys-very-serious-making-roster-better-ahead-nfl-trade-deadline

Finished "Lobizona" by Romina Garber. I have extremely mixed feelings about this book. It's a powerful depiction of the fear of living as an undocumented child/teen and it has interesting things to say about rejection, belonging, and the choice between seeking to be recognized for who you are and wanting you blend in enough to be accepted as normal. However, it's also an explicit homage to Harry Potter, and while it doesn't include antisemitic tropes or glorify slavery or even have any anti-trans sentiments I can detect, to me the magical school setup felt forced and I thought it would have been a better book had it not tried to fit that mould. Also, it would have been a super interesting situation to explore trans issues, and while it's definitely fine for it not to do that, the author's praise of Rowling's work has me wondering...
There's a sequel that I think could in theory be amazing, but given the execution of the first book, I think I'll wait a bit before checking it out. By putting her main character in opposition to both ICE in the human world and the magical authorities in the other world, Garber explicitly sets the stage for a revolution standing between her protagonist and any kind of lasting peace. But I'm not confident she's capable of writing that story without relying on some kind of supernatural deus ex machina, which would be disappointing to me, since "a better world if only possible through divine intervention" is an inherently regressive message.
Overall, #OwnVoices fantasy centering an undocumented immigrant is an excellent thing, and I've certainly got a lot of privilege that surely influences my criticism. However, #OwnVoices stuff has a range of levels of craft and political stances, and it can be excellent for some reasons and mediocre for others.
On that point, if anyone reading this has suggestions for fiction books grappling with borders and the carceral state, Is be happy to hear them.
#AmReading

Discovery of carbon monoxide emission from five debris disks around young A-type stars
A. Mo\'or, P. \'Abrah\'am, \'A, K\'osp\'al, G. Cataldi, A. M. Hughes, S. Marino, Q. Kral, J. Milli, N. Pawellek
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16104

Discovery of carbon monoxide emission from five debris disks around young A-type stars
Over the past fifteen years, surveys mainly at millimeter wavelengths have led to the discovery of $\sim$20 gas-bearing debris disks, most of them surrounding young intermediate-mass stars. Exploring the properties and origin of this gas could be fundamental to better understanding the transition between the protoplanetary and debris disk phases, the evolution of icy planetesimal belts, and the formation of planetary atmospheres. To expand the list of known CO-bearing debris disks and to improv…

It's really frustrating to be able to see a false assumption in software that you have to use, at work for example, but have no feedback channel. I can see why you thought that but if you'd just ask I could help you make it better!

And when I'm talking about understanding the drives to violence, I did write about something similar recently.
https://write.as/hexmhell/algorithmic-violence
The drives behind this and the shooting last week are pretty radically different, but there's some overlap. People like Kirk are part a huge political machine slowly crushing people all over the world. There's a hopeless rage that would naturally drive even the most calm person to the edge of violence. You can't look at the world honestly and be OK. We want to do something. We want to react. But everything we do is silenced or must rmain silent. So it's easy to understand why someone might choose violence. Very different situation, but everyone is subject to the same national and international influences.
I don't promote violence, not because I disagree with it but because I think it's expensive. It takes time to plan, especially for those trying to get away. Guns are not cheap, nor are bullets, nor is the range time you need to get somewhat good under pressure. It's not cheap for the person doing it, and it's not cheap for the community that has to clean up. The community will face police repression (which, if we're honest, was gonna come anyway). The community will have to post bail, will lose a person for a while, will need to support the family, will go to hearings, will write reports, will do interviews.
Sun Tzu said that deploying one soldier to the front takes 7 in the field. Logistics are a huge invisible cost. Some of that time and energy could be reused. It's never bad to be armed and able to defend if needed. But a lot of that energy and time would be better spent planning a community pantry, a tool library, organizing a union, etc. We are living in a disaster, and we need to invest in thriving through the next crumble.
Kirk is replacable. They're almost all replacable, because they don't really care about human life. We do, so none of us are. It's not really a worth while trade, IMHO.

Cowboys, Buccaneers named possible trade partners for Dolphins edge-rusher https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/dallas-cowboys/news/cowboys-buccaneers-named-possible-trade-partners-dolphins-edge-r…

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

I keep saying the same thing over and over with my kids: you don't make decisions with your voice, you make them with your body.
"I want to go to the park."
"Ok, put your shoes on."
"I want to go on my play date."
"Put on a jacket and get in the bike."
"I don't want to be late to school."
"I don't control time, if you don't want to be late you have to brush your teeth."
There's a fundamental truth underlying this concept though, one that I hadn't really thought about. On some level, I feel as though, any choice you can't make with your body isn't a real choice. If you're begging someone to do something for you, it's ultimately not something you control.
As I'm compelled, by threat of violence against my family, to pay for war against my comrades and to kill people I don't even know, I think about that. How far is our concept of freedom from the police state we are taught to imagine as the global beacon of liberty. My participation in the violence had always been compulsory.
Perhaps we could do better than just #NoKings.
#USPol

Browns, Raiders floated as landing spots for 10-time Pro Bowl quarterback https://www.sportingnews.com/us/nfl/cleveland-browns/news/browns-raiders-floated-landing-spots-10-time-pro-bowl-quarterback…

Jerry Jones Drops Huge Hint On Cowboys Contract Extension Plan https://heavy.com/sports/nfl/dallas-cowboys/jerry-jones-contract-extension-hint-update/?adt_ei=[email]

I keep coming back to the mirror dualities of the oppressed and oppressor under authoritarianism.
The oppressed is portrayed as both weak and godlike. The stereotypes are always some variation on sloth and incompetence, but yet somehow also a menace capable of destroying the "pure" society. To use the most relevant current example, Antifa being both little femme soy boys who would always get beat up by "real men" while also being an international terrorist organization on the brink of overthrowing the US government, the unarmed presence of whom makes the heavily armed agents of ICE flee for their lives. Antifa is both having absolutely no impact on ICE, and also having such an impact on ICE that the military needs to come in to protect them. The contradiction is obvious but never seems to occur to those who hold both to be true at the same time.
But few talk about the duality of the oppressor. The sovereign throughout history has always been both a ruler above the law, sometimes even the representative or incarnation of a divine force. Yet, this same superhuman/god-man is also a baby who needs constant care. This is absolutely a through line from the very earliest records of sovereign cults to modern cult leaders, CEOs, and Trump today. Power, for these people, is expressed both as the ability to force others to enact their will and in the ability to compel others to care for them. Can any of these "men" cook? Can they fix anything themselves? They are driven everywhere, cooked for all the time, constantly protected from danger. Kings are still dressed, at least for rituals. I could dissect masculinity here, but that's a whole thing.
It is as though the drive to care for our children, who must be taught to behave within acceptable norms, is hijacked by "leaders" who demand our care and attention... even at the expense of our literal children. And recently we've seen some of those very CEOs, with LLMs and return to office demands, show that their judgment is also little better than children, making decisions while pretending to understand a subject.
The oppressed are portrayed as both god-like and impotent and are, in fact, neither. Meanwhile the rulers portray themselves only as invulnerable and are, in fact, childish in their ability to survive without constant support. Their greatest fear from the collapse of society is figuring out how to make sure people keep taking care of them.
It just keeps rattling around in my head.
#USPol

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