I feel like its up to the people at this point. We have to start gardens, geurilla gardening, community gardens. And talk to your neighbors about not using herbicides and pesticides. Plant wild flowers all over your yard and other flowers, and start bee colonies if you have the space.

I read before that consumers are not logical at all and it blew my mind. All purchases are emotional. A man goes and buys a gigantic truck and says it is because “he needs it to do work”, because his appraisal of himself is he doesn’t believe in BS, he is logical, he is the one who gets things done.

But the marketers know the truth: he is buying the truck because he is insecure, socially scared and wants to project intimidation at others. He is a conformist who wants admittance to the “in-group”. For this reason, he will financially overcompensate to “prove” his manliness to himself and the in-group.

The man purchasing isn’t self-aware enough to recognize his own motives, which makes it easier for the salesperson to exploit their vulnerabilities for profit. Sales 101 textbooks basically say this : in order to sell something, you put forward an unspoken emotional proposition disguised as a logical choice.

As someone who has eaten tofu for decades, it is like oatmeal (in my opinion). It is bland until you learn to spice it properly. But even getting someone to cook their own cheeseburger is impossible if they are addicted to the convenience and stability of corporate food.

But I agree with your wider point. It was obvious to me that the whole “soy causes feminization via phytoestrogen” is just pesudo-scientific disinformation, but it was effective working class targeted propaganda in the USA. Undoubtedly it is the massive dairy lobby behind it all. The oil industry did the same with global warming. And every capitalist joins their bandwagon because they are all united against environmentalism of any kind, even to save their own future family members.

I also find it weird that soy farmers are the salt of the earth types who make up Trump’s base (I live in the Midwest in soybean country), and it would make sense to advance their interests. But the system isn’t logical, it is a quilt made of many swaths of corruption, some competing against each other (dairy vs soy).

Everyone is bound to eventually hate him, because it is as if he is going through every group in the world and giving them a middle finger one after the other. One day it is Canadians, the next USA farmers, then Greenland, then posting racist memes. Sometimes he sits up all night posting hateful nonsense about people like Rosie O’Donnell or Treveor Noah. It’s exhausting how much of a hater he is.

BUT it is other haters who enabled Trump. It is a deep cultural rot that needs addressing, namely the evil excesses of capitalism and racism.

They are all in a world of debauchery that the commoners are only half-aware of, is my suspicion. Sort of like, once you try a single hard drug, you are probably more likely to try more or progressively harder drugs. Once you break the wall of trying one thing you know is terrible, your walls are broken down to making ever-worse decisions.

The nature of dopamine is to want more, newer, novel experiences. If that is driven by sick, psychopathic and unrestrained impulses (the same thing that drove their impulse to conquer business or politics), it will always get progressively worse and more extreme.

I feel sometimes like many of them almost acknowledge their weird dichotomies but compartmentalize it. For example, to support ICE to me seems inherently unchristian, because the bible including the new testament constantly talks about treating foreigners well and being peaceful/forgiving/non-materialistic.

But they will excuse voting for Trump by saying “well, he isn’t my preacher!”. To me that is simply moral relativism, so the Christian part is even more odd, how they barely ever display the values the bible says that they are supposed to live by. It is totally superficial and a country-club type arrangement.

The government is a proxy that allows their bigotry to manifest in the real world, while they can still wear a fake smile and say “I’ll pray for you” and in their own mind they are an agent of peace on earth through their prayers. Christianity (USA right-wing varieties) to me is a strange broken mindset, I grew up with reformed Christianity and have had to purge it from my mind as an adult.

Unsurprising. Usually the far-right church infrastructure also buys tickets in bulks to these types of events.

I used to date a woman whose dad was a pastor and his church would get bulk tickets to stuff like Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ to give out like candy. It undoubtedly inflated the box office numbers.

Most people don’t label 17 year olds as “children”. The process is something more like baby>toddler>child>pre-teen>teen/adolescence>young adulthood>adulthood.

Since everyone matures at different levels at different times, and maturity itself is subjective, most societies air on the side of caution by legally defining people as minors (not children). They are called this because they are still in a state of cognitive development. The ones who are above average are the exception to the rule.

It makes sense why we do this, because minors are supposed to be ushered into adulthood with gradual increases in freedom, such as being able to drive with a permit or go to school dances by themselves before they are considered a tax-paying citizen.

You are conflating maturity with chronological age. We use chronological age and not maturity as the social metric of “adulthood” so your relativistic claim is just nonsense.

I actually love the “watch free” channels on my TV. It’s full of obscure stuff like 1970s gameshows, This Old House episodes, random old weird direct-to-video movies.

In my opinion, Debian is best for small, specific purposes that don’t change much over time. I used Debian for a bit as a home PC, mostly for making music with bitwig and gaming on steam as well as freetube/media consumption.

I had trouble with apps having conflicts, and combined with an nvidia card, the experience got worse over time and I had to separate my system into different bootable linux systems on the same drive, one distro for gaming and one for music. Some apps were deb files, some were apt, some were direct from websites and others immutable type apps, a mess.

Eventually I tried Arch based systems and liked how unified pacman is and how there are meta-packages full of music and RT. Then moved to Cachyos because it is just so much less annoying that vanilla Arch maintenance for me. I also used endeavorOS for a while, but at one point started having endless crashes from that distro across 2 different PCs (some black screen video issue with nvidia GPU).

As to how that applies to what I would recommend:

I think Debian is good at specific use-cases, but poor as an everyday home PC imo. Also, Debian is so barebones that things like a firewall aren’t pre-configured, which makes it more of an intermediate distro that seems easy on first glance.

I wouldn’t recommend Ubuntu personally, because the last few times I have tried it I found it buggy and I don’t like snaps. But there are so many Debian derivative distros that in some cases Ubuntu is the best option, for example, Ubuntu Studio is actually pretty nice for quickly making creative content. There also Ubuntu distros pre-configured for other purposes.

Linux Mint seems to have outdated packages, but overall decent for beginners because it is a debian/ubuntu sub-distro that has a lot of polish and is really good at hardware detection on installation. I also think the linux mint DE is pretty good for new users.