Then the religion isn’t for you. It’s not for me either. The fact that there are so many hoops to jump through, simply to satisfy the world’s worst library of Bronze and Iron age fanfic nonsense, makes me shake my head at the whole exercise.
The fact remains though, that it’s incredibly important to a lot of people, and if they want to try to square the circle in a way that tends towards justice, then I’m not going to come down hard on them. Pick your battles and whatnot.
Maybe how angsty you were feeling when the internet arrived in your town? I dunno. It feels very appropriate though, that the forgotten gen X would spawn its own even more liminal sub/pseudo group.
One: Hello, fellow Xennial. I’m just a couple of years older than you.
Two: I find we sort of sort ourselves based on life experience, family structure, etc. I have an brother 7 years older than me, so I skew Gen-X. My wife is less than a year younger than me, but she’s the oldest and her parents are a touch younger a d fair bit less traditional than mine, so she skews Millenial.
The generations are a convenient shorthand to discuss broad trends about how certain cultural and economic factors affect the shared experiences of certain cohorts, but they’re pretty silly, especially on the edges. Chronological astrology, really.
I cannot believe that you, [80’S ICON], are still in your same demanding front-line job! Don’t you realize that [SUPPORTING CHARACTER] is now a [POSITION OF AUTHORITY]?!?!?!?!?
I just did a quick YT search. It was literally half a second as they were coming back from break and she instantly puts on her BBC anchor face. I wouldn’t even get (more) angry with a Fox News or RT presenter for doing what she did. No biggie at all.
Somewhere in the corner, Joseph Smith is scribbling furiously…
That’s the funny thing. As far as I know, you’re completely right. I am not seriously tuned in or anything, but talking to my father-in-law and my wife’s cousin (both Punjab-born Sikhs and no strangers to taking pride in their identities) as well as sort of generally keeping up with the basics in the news, the sense I get is that “Khalistan” as a movement very much peaked in the 1980s with Operation Blue Star, the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the subsequent riots, and culminating in the Air India bombing in 1985. Since then, it’s been a slow erosion as Indian identity has stabilized, as the democracy became a bit more robust (seriously being tested now), and Sikhs felt better integrated into the country. The idea of being effectively a weak buffer state between India and Pakistan just sort of loses its charm when the population doesn’t feel desperately repressed. The first Sikh PM was even a member of the Gandhis’ Congress Party. The diaspora is doing well, and in many western countries Sikhs serve as useful, informal cultural ambassadors for the nation of India.
Many Sikhs even supported the Modi and the BJP at first, but as the Hindu nationalists find success in oppressing Muslims, suddenly there are more voices that the Sikhs in Punjab need to be brought to heel as well, or at least that their concerns are unimportant and do not need to be addressed. Even still, most of the loud separatist voices are outside of Punjab and couching most of their rhetoric in peaceful terms, and the drive for any serious resistance remains fringe. Modi et al are fanning tiny embers of resistance that would normally be unlikely to cause great harm to India or the world. If they don’t stop shooting straw men, they’re going to create the exact problem they claim to be trying to fight.
I get that OP is almost more thinking of people’s “comfort food” works that serve that need for them personally, but Becky Chambers is very specifically writing to inspire that kind of feeling from the get-go. Life can get hard, bad things can happen, but good things too, and people (including pan-sexual bird aliens) are just living in the future the same way they do now and most of them are trying to be decent.
I mean, the anarcho-capitalists are fairly extreme, but the libertarians in general seem to be people who want to lock in the benefits they’ve got in the current system and remove any barriers to fucking over people who don’t have them. They also seem to forget that you can’t just declare that coercive force no longer exists. The best you can do is try to have some sort of consensus to apply it fairly and sparingly and in the pursuit of noble ends. All of their proposals are just variations on directing the thrust of that power to enforce the status quo when it comes to property holders.
The crazy thing is I’m not even particularly ideological, and I imagine our friends on the .ml domains would not be fans of me. I am just in favor of measures to moderate the worst tendencies of capitalism and to preserve the fact that no one succeeds in a vacuum, things like paying my fair share so people can have safety and opportunity. The Libertarians are just not what they claim to be, either because they’re evil or naive.
TL;DR: Basically, in the US at least, Libertarians are spoiled white guys who don’t even understand how good they have it and have Ayn Rand power fantasies that they’ll make their own way and the rest of the world has just been dragging them down.
A couple of my college buddies are full on Ludwig Von Mises/Murray Rothbard anarcho-capitalist nutjobs. The basic conceit is that all governments and states are illegitimate uses of force and are drags on the free functioning of the economy. Left with no “coercive” governments, people will competitively self-organize into private collectives to replace all governmental services, and all resources will flow to their best and natural use. It’s absurdly naive and ignores absolutely everything about human nature and even the de facto reality of their desired end state.
So somehow private property will continue to exist and be protected by voluntary courts and security, and funny how it works out that in this case my buddies get to keep the fruits of the privilege enjoyed by centuries of their ancestors and built up in a decidedly non anarcho-capitalist system. All existing government property will be sold off and the proceeds distributed to… someone? No word on how natural monopolies like the best water route between two river ports will be handled, but it will be privately negotiated and definitely perfect!
It will be a utopia of people pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and not letting silly things like “personal safety” or “living wage” or “stewardship of resources” get in the way of making the completely even-handed and non-coercive deals that all people will make with the private entities that spring up to replace governments, but only VOLUNTARILY! People definitely won’t make deals they don’t like, and that reduce their future power, to avoid death in a “market” with limited opportunities. They definitely won’t leave their shares (or whatever) to their children and recreate all the same social structures we have now, but with corporate self-interest as literally the only governing norm.
Now, I suppose you could end up with corporate bodies that are outcompeted by “fairer” competitors (ignoring, of course, all first mover advantages and the willingness to protect profits by violent force that we already see in so many times and places), or maybe certain security and judicial corporations will make agreements with each other and install themselves as a layer over the more economically productive companies and collect fees that are definitely not taxes. Maybe some of them will be the “fairer” entities.
But where does that leave you? Basically, our current world is already at least a little better than the libertarians’ best-case scenario, and what their system really does is tell people to give up, that they are not worth one cent more than the economic value they can provide to someone else, and that they deserve no voice in the governance of their lives beyond what they can take.
How this doesn’t descend into competing warlord fiefdoms, eventually to be swept away by spasms of violence (in this system, “competition” is just a euphemism for politics and war), is beyond me. With some luck, it might lead to some parts of the world on a tortuously slow and uneven march in the vague direction of egalitarian governance to moderate the use of coercive force. In that case, CONGRATULATIONS! You’ve landed the world right back where it started, but now with millions dead and the Earth in even worse shape than it would have been.
As a defender of Tex-Mex as a legitimate fusion cuisine, can confirm that the Europeans do terrible things to Tex-Mex. You may think you’re over margaritas, chili powder, refried beans, yellow cheese, and salsa roja, but you will change your tune when confronted with odd vodka concoctions, paprika (and precious little of that), crunchy half raw white beans, mozzarella, and water-thinned ketchup.
I’ve drawn my luddite line at Twitter and Discord. The twitter decision is seeming like a very good idea, and I assume the Discord one eventually will, too.
Swedish Fish are garbage, dear friend. They are like a depressed dystopian robot’s impression of candy. If we’re going to kill ourselves eating overprocessed sugar, it should at least be tasty. Even the simple step to Gummy Bears marks a vast improvement.
$4.50 more and a smaller piece of dessert and they could have got a meal for 8 with probably a better veggie patty. Could have saved $1.50 to go with the cheapo buns, but the Sara Lee, while equally processed (I am not judging… they look pretty good), are a small investment to improve the dinner.
I have family by marriage in the Sikh community, including my father-in-law. I have all the respect in the world for anyone who can take that level of ignorance and instead of making the decision to try to escape the situation with simple demographic facts – a decision which is both rational for their self-preservation and vital to their self-identity – they instead volunteer to stay in danger because standing up for the oppressed is the right thing to do. It’s a very peculiar and heartbreaking burden that Sikhs have in many countries, and I’ve seen it taken on bravely much more often than not.
Then you haven’t met my wife’s extended family, LOL. A couple of them are real pieces of work. People are people after all.
That said, Sikhism as a non-proselytizing and minority religion (outside Punjab) will tend not to have as many religious zealots up in everybody’s face.
My parenthetical seems to have mysteriously vanished!
For English speakers, you can mentally substitute “idiom explained” and “example given” as a mnemonic to help remember the difference.
Then let employers shift hours or start times if they rely on daylight. Nothing that comes from DST is useful enough to be universally mandatory.
You can only apply to jobs in European countries.
Sorry, I don’t make the rules.