Ok so let’s address the ice cream fervor. The Atlantic posted an article about ice cream being good for you (I guess we’re trusting them now..?)
Let’s look at the first few paragraphs (I’m not going to pay for the full):
If you read that and don’t immediately assume that you’re being bullshitted, please unsub from us lol. “Nation’s most influential department of nutrition” lmfao, that literally means what they shill is untrue and they’re lying to you. Not to turn this into a Bob’s Red Pill (maybe the next one), but you know, for example, big pharma has tricks up their sleeve to make a study or paper on a novel drug look safer and more effective than it really is, right? You also know that food industries do the exact same thing?
Oh, but Ray Peat says ice cream is good, this validates him! Look, I like young Mossy Peat (RIP), learned a lot from him. But I think one valid critique of him is he tends to find the *best* news and qualities about addictive foods like coffee and ice cream. Also, as we’ve mentioned, the Peat fans are often 100x cringer than the man himself, many such cases. Hey I like eating ice cream (non dairy for me) but do we need to make every weird habit healthy? Idk
Glen: It’s the tara gum bro, trust me. I don’t know enough about Ray Peat’s teachings to say that he thinks this way, but some of the newly Peat-pilled people adopt a lazy logic of “If we remove x ingredient from this product, it becomes healthy”. Eat the Ice Cream, it’s fine. Just admit you’re indulging in something that’s not great for you.
Just gonna go ahead and say it, I’m not a big fan of cops. There is this common path among reformed liberals and leftists where they realize that everything they believed pre-covid was a lie, including the claim that All Cops Are Bastards. While I don’t think its right to burn down cities like Minneapolis in order to get more Democrats that will relax punishment on violent crime elected, I think it’s a mistake to “Back The Blue”. Chances are if you’re reading this, you think a little different from the norm, and if you differ from the average FoxNews/CNN demographic, you need a healthy distrust of authority at all times. Cops are the foot soldiers of whoever is in power and covid was the perfect example of that. When draconian covid measures were deployed on working people, who was called upon to break up church gatherings and escort people out of businesses for not wearing a mask or getting the latest experimental shot?
The tough part about talking about this issue is that if an ardent police advocate read that last paragraph, they would algorithmically come to a conclusion that I want the police defunded; that’s where we are now in 2023 discourse about the protection of Americans. You either want police to have carte blanche to shut down farmers who bypass pasteurization, or you want DMV employees to deescalate hostage situations (Psi — lol!). It’s what the media does best: give you two extreme options about how the law is enforced while the gradual erosion of civil liberties takes place behind the scenes. I obviously understand the need for competent law enforcement, but laws change and not usually for the better, so I feel the need to be a police skeptic going forward.
On work days, I rarely get to sleep in past 5am and the way I wake up is rather jarring. My phone goes off with this high pitched, skull drilling alarm (you all know the sound unless you’re a broke android user) and I stumble to turn it off and then a bright screen blasts my eyes with the first light they’ll see today. This doesn’t feel right and although I can’t change what time I go in for work in the morning at this current job, There’s got to be another way to wake up. Sure I could change the alarm tone to a more soothing sound, but then I feel like that will make it easier to hit the snooze button, making me late for work. The real move may be going back to a 90’s era digital alarm clock. Something that doesn’t make me look at a screen within minutes of waking up.
Really the goal is to find a job that I actually like that allows me to wake up with the sun and establish healthy rhythms for the day. It is crazy to think we often have to wake up at a time that our eyes aren’t adjusted to and it feels like we are set up so poorly for the day that it’s a miracle when we have a good one. It’s not the way to live and there’s this pride that people have in not sleeping that I wish would go away. Sleeping is a luxury that should be used as a flex when you get plenty of it. It’s the ultimate sign of satisfaction in life when you can put your head on your pillow at a reasonable hour in the night, knowing that you’re that much closer to waking up in the morning and having yet another good day.
For now, I think my problem is being too alarm dependent in that I know that I can stay up way past my bedtime (I should be in bed by 9:30pm) because I have the option of being shocked awake by my iPhone to go to a job I hate.
Psi — I find it interesting that Apple, a “cool” company, chose the most jarring fucking default alarm noise lol. On that note, whenever I connect to my Bluetooth speaker (I’ll heal the cancer naturally later when it comes), my iPhone scolds me for “listening too loud” as it assumes I’m wearing headphones. When did Apple become our strict parental guardian figure lol?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is running for President and I think people are making this way more complicated than it really is. He may think he can win (He can’t), but the whole point of his candidacy is to sew chaos and remind everyone about what happened in 2020. It seems like Trump and Biden want to move past Operation Warp Speed, Lockdowns, Vaccine Mandates, and the largest wealth transfer in history, but we need someone to remind them, as well as the general population of the lingering effects of Covid austerity. We cannot let any future President, no matter who it is, act as if nothing happened, especially since Covid vaccines remain on the Childhood Vaccine Schedule.
There seems to be some line of thinking, which I fail to understand, that this somehow hurts the chances of Biden losing and that RFK is some kind of “meme candidate” a la Andrew Yang, but I don’t see that. Deep down, everyone knows that the face behind Children’s Health Defense has a less than zero percent chance of winning, but he’s a big name, knows how to play the game, and stands his ground on many topics that the RC community greatly values. I have less of a need for a “Red Wave” in 2024 than I do for someone to come in and shake things up and press both notable candidates on our nation’s allegiance to Big Pharma and Tech. Let it rip, RFK.
Since 2022, tech companies have been doing mass layoffs due to overinflated staffs and to be quite honest, realizing that probably thirty percent of their employees are not essential. Even the most based and redpilled covid truthers loved the work from home option, and who can blame them? If you have kids, you get to see them more often, and you get to chill on your couch and answer Zoom calls with your camera off for eight hours, with no brutal commute at the end of the day. But were people under the impression that companies were going to sustain this? Sure, some employees get retained and could possibly work from home on a long term basis, but once companies start lowering their overhead after the covid state of emergency fear-mongering wore off, they usually keep doing it until it hinders production.
People were Charlton Heston “pry it from my cold, dead hands” level protective over their cushy covid workplace and I can’t help but think this is how people let austerity happen. We are creatures of comfort, if nothing else, and all we need is a bone thrown our way while the rest of the workforce around us crumbles. Only thing about said bone is that it’s one of those ones that turns into nothing after a while. Our easy work from home job, is now either no longer necessary, or done by someone in Bangladesh with the help of ChatGPT or whatever new demonic AI thing our employers adopt. I think we need to realize that temporary comfort isn’t always worth the impending doom on the upcoming horizon. It’s the credit card mentality, but eventually you have to pay the bill.
Psi — I think if you want to work from home, what you really want is to be self employed. Imagine having a boss while you work in your pajamas?! Time to hustle and grind, young wage slave. Also sub to our paid feed so we don’t have to, lol.
Make sure you check out our episode “Evolution” with Yeerk P and read the latest Bob’s Red Pill on that big thing in the sky called The Moon. No one knows how it got there. Or do we?
Seemingly slept on Alison McDowell never fails to keep me on my toes on an array of topics. She recently posted an excerpt from a larger talk where she offers a critique of the RFK candidacy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z6fba0EEWb8&t=420s
Angela Nagle's most recent substack post concerning thoughts on automation forced a double take by me on a topic I've always by default remained rigidly skeptical about:
https://angelanagle.substack.com/p/scarce-labor-as-the-cause-of-innovation
I've never worked a desk job but automation in the physical realm has always made me a bit queasy. The Luddite Wendell Berry ass take is that it's all bad. I can't disagree, but then we live in a world far from one that promotes values in line with the philosophy of such a man that this world was never meant for one as beautiful as...
...Starry Starry Night...
In reality I avoid modern drudgery like the plague and would probably prefer to chew glass
than to be the check out rather than the Self, though I've always boycotted such contraptions. A contradiction...
Here in Canada, a large federal public sector union is striking. Aside from a raise in compensation, Working From Home is apparently high up on the priority list (among other, funnily specific demands for indigenous people in their ranks). It's amusing to see this now cliched idea about the 'laptop class' play out so starkly before the country's eyes. I think what Psi says about these people is basically true, although there must be a fraction of these jobs where you're quite literally phoning it in and pressure from on high is fairly minimal, I suppose the ones subject for termination sooner or later. Nonetheless I'd expect you might be getting all of the benefits of self employment without the responsibility of managing a viable business.
I also never not roll my eyes when I'm connected to someone fastened into a pod halfway around (across?) the planet who can barely speak my language but is tasked with resolving my mundane technical issue I'm having in my own pod. Again, I'm apparently glad that it's them chewing the glass and not me...