Unchecked, power consolidates. – Barry from Barry’s Economics

Karl Marx also said approximately as much in Das Kapital

Actually the centrists are right-wing. Social Democrats are centrist compared to mainstream Europe, but even EU nations have drifted rightward thanks to neoliberalism.

Capitalism ruins everything.

No war but class war.

I’ve been trying to get involved in activism in order to stop MAGA from taking the US midterms by force (see Louisiana v. Callais ruling by SCOTUS and then all the southern states redistricting mid-election).

Election-focused activism is canvassing, and interrupting people’s lives by cold-calling people would be soul-crushing work. I could write postcards but my left-handed handwriting scrawl is awful.

Visibility activism is going out into loud crowds. I’m scared of large crowds generally. Large screaming / chanting crowds are overwhelming.

Noncooperation activism involves civil disobedience and the willingness to confront law enforcement (or ICE / CBP) and risk brutality from the same. Also they want young people on the front line, and I’m way old.

All of them would really rather I just give them a lot of money, and I’m low income.

Then there’s the infighting in the Democratic party, since the DNC and DCCC only support center-right establishment candidates, and progressive socialist candidates are the ones that actually inspire the youth to get out and vote, but good luck getting them support by the mainstream party.

And then there’s that daunting feeling that there’s nothing for SCOTUS which suffers no consequences when the conservative Federalist-Society supermajority drops rulings that strip away civil rights or kill public protections or destroy democratic features. Reform takes a long time and requires the left to take power first (and then – since we’re talking establishment Democrats – being willing to pass SCOTUS reforms)

The organizers who’ve hosted meetings so far insist we’ll campaign harder, but we have to win by unquestionable margins or expect challenges to the election results. And the Democrats campaigned harder in the 2024 general and lost to the trillion-dollar far-right propaganda machine that churns out fear and rage and prejudice.

So I’m having a hard time not despairing, and other than writing crabby letters to my representatives (which feels like shouting into the void), I can’t seem to find a role to play in the resistance.

So I’m feeling discouraged AF.

Never Again, for some people means we never tolerate genocide again, nowhere, no how.

And for other people Never Again, means never to us again.

Here

Unchecked, power consolidates. Marx notes in Das Kapital the Capitalist will always seek to capture regulatory bodies in the name of profit.

The goal, thus, becomes to distribute political power (including wealth) as diffusely and evenly as possible, and create a system that checks efforts from outside to attack and break its integrity.

The USSR was beleaguered from the beginning by sanctions by the rest of the western world, as pressured by President Wilson. As problematic as the Leninist model was, we don’t know how it would have fared if it were left to engage with the world on its own terms.

Considering his continuous use of the Sleepy Joe epithet for Biden (who was far, far from this sleepy), it really highlights the notion that every accusation is a confession.

The cult leader always is excepted to his own rules.

The Reddit API situation brought me here. It’s a much nicer crew.

That bible experts cannot agree on what the bible means, and which of its doctrine is important, makes for a strong argument that it is a historical document, neither inspired, nor univocal, nor inerrant.

If it were divine, then its meaning would be clear beyond debate.

In other words, it’s just a bunch of mythology invented by dudes in the bronze age, and nothing more.

I don’t know who wrote the characters. Some developers in Ubisoft in the early 2010s, I presume. Looking at the extensive credits, I never found a name that I recognized.

It could all be coincidence, but there’s a significant amount of similarity.

In Watch Dogs 2 the initial hackerspace is in the basement of a game store in the lower Haight in San Francisco, which smacks smartly of Gamescape on Divisadero Street between Oak and Fell. It’s still there according to Google, even though everything around it was gentrified out of existence, including the cheap flat I lived in.

I’m pretty sure my years as a Gamescape regular inspired the character Josh Sauchak. I lived with the woman who probably inspired Sitara Dhawan, and we are pretty sure of the identity of the guy who inspired Wrench.

In March 2026, I learned I’m not just ASD but spectrum AF according to a psychiatric assessment. It explains a lot, including why I find dealing with people super awkward. Right now I’m isolated where I live trying to figure out how to make friends when I super-suck at making friends or even being social.

I’ve been thinking of starting off with Don’t mind me, I’m spectrum AF as soon as the flow of conversation stops because I said something awkward (or didn’t say the expected thing, or whatever).

I suffer from major depression and have since I was a kid. I was diagnosed at fifty to be ASD and a recent assessment in March confirmed I’m spectrum AF.

I worked for a few years and was nearly driven to suicide and have been on disability ever since. Not a bad thing. All my career hopes either required education and credentials I couldn’t ever afford to acquire, or had spirit-crushing consequences (e.g. crunching, which practically all video-game developers are required to suffer).

We often have better perspective regarding other people’s troubles than we do our own.

We’re also often still wrong about it, anyway.

To paraphrase Bill Nye, eye protection on; if you raise the cost of fossil fuels, fewer people will use them; eye protection off.

When you’re sixty and hang around with any of the more recent generations…

I succumbed to a psychotic break in November 2024 when my wife of twelve years left me and the US voted Trump into office. Mind you, I’m spectrum AF and suffer from lifelong major depression, but the turn of circumstances was a doozy.

I spent 2025 on the med-adjustment carousel trying a variety of mood stabilizers and anti-psychotics. In all cases the physiological side effects were too extreme, but more than that, they persisted months after I stopped taking the med.

For a while it took a confirmation by the Senate for me to pee. Sometimes it was excruciating. Months after stopping the culprit med, I got the ability the pee regularly and then on demand.

An early one drove me to sleep all day. I still sleep for 11-13 hours a day.

At this point I’m only on a dopamine reuptake inhibitor and nothing else. I’m trained in DBT which helps, but with practice I might actually be able to manage my depression.

My hypothesis: Youth pastors are supposed to counsel teens in order to woo them into the fold. They’re there to help, but not for sake of the teen but for selling the teen Jesus. It’s dishonest work for an allegedly good cause.

But someone who can sustain that kind of dissonant duality in their relationships can do so for other causes. If they can be equivocal for Jesus, they can be equivocal for their own libido as well.

Hence the nickname given to YPs by the kids The freak of the week.

Incest is strictly about blood relations. The step-sibling / step-child porn genre is shorthand for fantasies about getting it on within the cohabitative family or close neighborhood. While there have been some movies that have explored actual incest (porn or otherwise), usually blood incest is regarded as a much more serious matter.

IRL, relationships between steps are verboten not because of the problems with breeding risks but because of how it complicates familial dynamics. It’s the same reason fraternization within military units or within work groups is restricted, or at least frowned upon.

Really, we’re still expected to ride on a raid to another tribal settlement and kidnap one of their coming-of-age womenfolk the way Hades abducted Persephone¹ Modern alternatives such as singles bars and mixing parties continue to prove wanting.

¹ According to the late Hellenic mythology – Persephone is queen of the underworld before Hades was ever around, and her abduction is more about pissing off Ceres and justifying why she’s sad every six months so we have winter.

The flip side to this is an escalation of break-ups that happen on or around Valentine’s Day every year, since the holiday encourages those en-coupled to have serious conversations with themselves about their relationship and if they actually like where they are and with whom. Surprise! Not so much.

Valentines day is about the tragedy of romance, either not having it or not getting it or finding out it was wrong all along.

And day-after chocolate sales.