I have such great memories of my mom giving me a good honkwhich. I would come home from school and she would feed me like a baby penguin. I felt so safe and secure, frankly I feel bad for the underprivileged youths who don’t get to have a honkwich.

I will say, he did get to paint on TV and know that maybe somewhere someone was better off for knowing he existed.

Bob Ross absolutely got something. Something worth more than any sum of gold.

I’m not sure if updating our tools is moving goal posts- what goal are we aiming for? I understand the frustration with seeing the measuring stick change to make the reasonable seem unreasonable, but I would say that the same measuring stick is now misrepresenting where people fall.

If we are talking political spectrums, there already are plenty of tools used: the linear left right, the horseshoe, the fishhook, the quadrant visualisation, etc. I’d say the data is now leaving the paper. We need new tools to make sense of it.

Much to your point though, I think it’s valuable to ask “what are we measuring, who’s doing the measuring, and who benefits from the answer?”

We will never have the satisfying answers to our questions, but hopefully we can find better questions to ask.

I think that the left/ right spectrum is outdated, or at least the definitions we give to each.

I mean, originally the left/ right divide was about whether to keep King Louis XVI around or to have him beheaded.

The spectrum we know as a communism vs capitalism scale really was useful in the cold war when those were the two sides of a bipolar world. When we still use this as the measuring stick, things become super confusing in the 21st century. Our world is no longer a communist vs capitalist struggle. Russia and China aren’t communist like the Soviet Union. The United States isn’t the same democratic state that it was in 1960.

I don’t know what our new spectrum is, that’s going to be the research of the next great political scientist, but I do think the old tools we’ve used are no longer helpful. Some are saying “woke vs unwoke”, some are saying “populism vs. globalism”, and some are saying simply “chaos vs order”. Perhaps it’s a little bit of all, or perhaps we should throw spectrums out altogether. Either way, if we use old tools for modern problems, we will end up confused. It’s like how jazz is seen as a super complex genre- it may simply be because we still use the music theory of 18th century European composers to try and understand Miles Davis. Of course it’s going to be a wild ride.

Oh of course, person by person there are folks who wouldn’t hesitate to grab a machete and get to work.

Hell, there are people in leftist camps who decided to join when they heard the word “guillotine”

I mean that’s what I assumed it meant. I didn’t think we were actually going to come out murdering people.

Ah I see.

Maybe this can help.

I’m happy to clarify, what part do you find confusing?

How can we be sure you’re not the secret billionaire!? 🤔

Best eat both of us just to make sure.

Edit:

Also OP and anyone who read my post because they said they might agree with me on this meme. Gotta root out enemies of the people.

Edit edit:

If anyone actually follows the line of any revolution, this is how it always goes. The guillotine will eventually kill the ones who bring it out.

Yea that’s exactly what I’m afraid of.

I’m anxious that all the praise for the CEO shooter is revealing that “eat the rich” wasn’t a euphemism for “tax the rich” but that people actually want the streets to run red with blood and cranberry sauce.

Cook me daddy

“we thought we hit rock bottom, but then we heard a knock from below” -Russian Joke

As someone who’s self employed, I feel like self employment is a form of rebellion against this system.

My dad teases me that his socialist son is now a capitalist because I give music lessons and host events. I’m pretty sure I’m not because I don’t profit from the labor of someone else, I do all the work and anyone who helps me isn’t existentially tied to me.