My personal experience tells me that reactionaries literally are scared. Scared of change and things they don't understand. Probably a controversial opinion but oh well
Some studies back this idea up with data, such as "Conservatives Anticipate and Experience Stronger Emotional Reactions to Negative Outcomes
Samantha Joel et al. J Pers. 2014 Feb." [1]
This is why it is more important than ever to be empathetic to others - we live in a crazy ass world with overwhelming amounts of both tragedy and beauty. The way each one of us perceives that endlessly complex environment is wholly unique, and it is the only reality each of us has ever known.
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> The French Revolution gave the English language three politically descriptive words denoting anti-progressive politics: (i) "reactionary", (ii) "conservative", and (iii) "right". "Reactionary" derives from the French word réactionnaire (a late 18th-century coinage based on the word réaction, "reaction") and "conservative" from conservateur, identifying monarchist parliamentarians opposed to the revolution.
We've banned this account for political flamewar, which is not what this site is for and destroys what it is for.
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I mean this genuinely and without insult: based on this impersonal and short interaction I wish for you to open your heart and mind a little bit. I believe it would be a happier and healthier way to live and I want that for all of humanity.
I've also personally seen a pattern in low score reviews on Amazon or other shopping sites where the person leaving the low score just simply didn't understand how to use the item properly, in some cases this is a majority of the bad reviews.
Another is when they had a problem with something external to the item itself such as shipping.
One time I was reading reviews of teapots on another company's (not Amazon) website. They seemed like really well-made beautiful porcelain teapots, and I couldn't figure out why there were so many people leaving disappointed reviews about the teapots cracking. Eventually after noticing certain details and reading certain reviews, I realized the reviews were all from people who had been using the teapots to boil water, as if they were kettles. Suddenly these comments went from reviews of the teapots to an index of how many people don't understand the difference between a teapot and kettle.
I feel like there's a big gap in retail websites for reviews that encourage more back and forth between the reviewer and reviewee and maybe some independent arbitration to draw this stuff out.
Something like a cross between an issue tracker and a lightweight court of law.
If Amazon were whacked around the head with an antitrust stick like Microsoft was in 2001, this is the kind of innovation that might actually flourish from newer startups.
You basically want balloon framing, in spirit if not in execution.
In old balloon framed houses you'll often find all the interior walls are not structural -- they were often built after the sheet rock was put in on the exterior walls and ceiling. That leaves you free to shift them however you please without compromising the stability of the house.
This is a natural progression balanced by layoffs, for whatever reason.
The idea that irks the Marxist in me is that middle managers might sometimes be exempt from layoffs due to their class. No idea if that happens, though.
Bluntly, using psychiatric medication is an indicator of mental illness. And some people judge such people very negatively, presuming they are unfit to handle serious responsibility. This perspective is sometimes official; in Canada, commercial airline pilots can't take antidepressants without informing the government, and Transport Canada routinely suspends such pilots. [1] Physicians are subject to similar, if less aggressive, restrictions.
Being honest, if I found out a person has a long, serious history of depression, I would probably think they are less reliable. That is probably prejudiced. But I think that's a common attitude. If it were a position where lives or a lot of property were on the line, maybe I would think twice in hiring?
As a person with mental health issues: people with such opinions are the vast majority, and therefore are also the majority of people managing sizeable teams. They aren't bad people, it's just how the world works.
It's also how people with mental health issues judge others with mental health issues: over how productive they are. For example, you have probably heard a lot about a functional, high-achieving person with ADHD person (because they are better at self-marketing, and because others easily see their value), but probably next to nothing about the low-functioning ADHD person who may never be able to hold down a job and has a patchy career. When a high-functioning "disabled person" is campaigning for greater workplace inclusivity, for instance, they're usually campaigning for other high-functioning people, not the low-functioning ones.
Functional people find low-functioning people less reliable. :( Partially because it is true, partially because it is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and partially because our society worships functionality (because it's what wins resources, at the end of the day).
If someone could not list a bunch of things that would prejudice them for or against an individual, then they're probably more prejudiced than the average person.
We all have prejudices. For example, I know I am biased against speakers of some regional accents of English. (All speakers of English are biased for or against various accents, if the studies are to be believed.) If someone produces a southern American drawl, I assume things about them. Those assumptions are not fair. But they're also automatic. The only way I know to correct such errors in thinking are to consciously reflect on it like that. How am I potentially prejudiced against or for this person? Are those prejudices even remotely reasonable? If not, am I potentially treating someone unjustly based on stereotypes and assumptions?
And don't worry. I understand myself well enough to know I'd be terrible in a management role.
I believe SSRIs are among the most prescribed medicine in the US. They’re certainly a blunt instrument. I’m all for MDMA or psilocybin research. From my own experience they are certainly very potent and can cause longer term changes in your mental well-being
Perhaps wanting control over the lives and property of others is the real mental illness, as it results in quite unreliable things happening in the world and throughout history.
It could cause me some reputational harm if my buprenorphine injection was to become common knowledge (in theory, in practice my family, friends and boss are well aware of my treatment for opioid use disorder).
I thought the reason ts/sci people weren't allowed to have any drug use in their history was because using illegal drugs could open them to blackmail? If you're taking an above-board medicine that wouldn't be a factor. I can't imagine one would lose their clearance if they were taking prescription amphetamines for ADHD treament, for example.
the most obvious example is people who still think it should be illegal and would look down on you for using it, it was never about the legality for them, the legality was just a side effect of their stance
We are all workers, we are the working class whether we are educated or not.
The capital owners want the working class to fight amongst themselves because it allows them to continue enriching themselves off the backs of the working class.
Even if you own some stocks or have a 401k, if you depend on a salary to pay your bills then you are a worker
Actually there are different levels of working class. A guy earning $18k per year working in retail isn't exactly in the same boat as the manager of the store making $80k a year.
That was a story made up by capital owners to keep the working class fighting amongst itself. The reality is that anyone who works for a wage is being taken advantage of
The middle class are those who have the capital to be capitalists to some degree, but not enough capital that they can live entirely off that capital, still requiring some kind of job to make ends meet. Someone earning $18k per year at their job could be middle class and someone earning $80k per year at their job could be working class. Their job income doesn't tell us anything with respect to their capital holdings.
Again, middle class is a concept invented by capital owners to keep the working class fighting amongst themselves. If you depend on a wage to survive, you are a worker
Working class is defined as those who must sell their labor in order to survive. If you cannot live off income of your investments alone and must work for a salary then you are a worker, you are working class
If you can quit your job and live purely off your investments then you are a capital owner, if you cannot do that without adjusting your lifestyle you're working class
It annoys me in the UK how people claim that "Tommy who 'does up houses' and flips them or rents them out" is a "working class builder", where as Billy isn't working class because he types on a keyboard.
In the UK working people, especially those earning above minimum wage, are taxed far more than the capitalists of the world like Tommy who can structure his income to pay just 30% marginal taxes rather than 60% plus.
Honestly it's the same in the US. But unfortunately the ones who fund the political campaigns are usually the ones with the lower tax rate, so that doesn't change.
Yeah, this suggestion still works okay. It used to work better, but now the advertisers have caught on. I give it another year or two before corporations have astroturffed the hell out of site:reddit.com searches and made them useless
What they don't seem to be talking about is learning from indigenous farming communities who use things like diversity in crops and rotation to keep soil quality high. These problems were solved decades ago, just not by the industrial farming community
It's like everyone who's ever watched a YouTube video about planting a 3 sisters garden has an opinion for the people actually staking their livelihood on this now.
It is more about that fact that people talking about sustainable food production do not share many goals with commodity farmers exchanging corn and soybeans for as much cash as possible.
At least farmers have the humility to not go on the internet and smear you based on their opinion of your use of a document database over a relational database.
"I've never farmed in my life, but I'm pretty sure I know more than the guy who has been doing it for decades and whose entire livelihood is based on it."
Pretending indigenous communities “solved” this is a farce. If we switched to their methods 90% of the population would need to die because they don’t scale.
Not a good look to strawman things like this when you have sibling comments elsewhere in this thread saying the discussion needs more nuance.
I actually did napkin math awhile back comparing a particular 16th century indigenous agricultural yields with 20th century American agriculture [0]. The indigenous system came out favorably until the second half of the 20th century despite the limitations of hand tools and natural fertilizer. There's still a gap between that and current yields, but I think it's fair to point out that most advocates of these systems are actually arguing for a synthesis with modern technologies that allow them to scale rather than a complete rejection of modernity.
It’s not a strawman and there isn’t much nuance to what you yourself said. It’s not even close to being adequate.
Claiming that people are arguing for “synthesis” is just a weasel word escape route. Indigenous farming is completely inadequate and the parts that are useful have already been incorporated into modern farming.
What is it you think is still on the table for this “synthesis”?
Are you familiar with how traditional agricultural systems tend to work? They're vastly different than modern industrial agriculture in my personal experience. You won't find average farms in Central Valley or the midwest doing intercropping (especially anything besides strip intercropping), hyperlocal heirloom varieties, terracing, and complex crop rotations.
Tractors don't like intercropping or terraces, complex rotations are logistically difficult and expensive without a meaningful market to back them. Distributors also don't want your optimized hyperlocal varietals nor do farmers want to manage seed production, so most people buy commercial varieties.
You don't need to explain why these things are true because I already get it. It's beside the point here.
> Are you familiar with how traditional agricultural systems tend to work?
Yes, they produced terrible yields that would starve the current population.
There is a reason farmers’ markets are for the upper middle class. Anything that isn’t done at scale can’t feed 8 billion people. If it can’t be done with combines/tractors/etc, it’s fucking useless.
Without experience, land, and modern industrial farming techniques? No, "everybody" would not start subsistence farming. There would be massive famines, billions would starve and die.
But if you ignore the labour demands per mouth fed, the education needed, the amount of land to feed current western population to sustainable replacement level, the requirement to maintain advanced defence systems to prevent land being taken or otherwise destroyed, the issues with the global climate affecting whatever you do in this agrarian society, could it be done?
Like the rest of industrial age development, farm automation has historically been built around treating everything uniformly (even distribution of seeds bred for easy harvest in evenly spaced rows evenly fertilizied with no rocks etc etc). Moving away from that introduces all kinds of complexity, mechanical problems, data problems, etc, which are not easy to solve even when you have historical existence proofs of potentially better ways to do things. It's happening though.
What I'm getting at is things like applying fertilizer based on estimated need from imaging data, using robots with lasers to kill weeds, mechanized intercropping, etc. Not something consumers will necessarily see any direct impact from but that improve the quality and economics of production.
A historical existence proof of a system or technology working has essentially nothing to do with whether it's being practiced in industry today, and whether it's being practiced today has very little to do with the product or pricing you see when you for example stop by KFC to eat a piece of chicken that's largely created out of corn, soy, and methane. That's the beauty of capitalism and commodity markets, John Deere can roll out technology for say computer-controlled planting that improves efficiency and the dividends get spread across the value chain without everyone having to know about it or change what they're doing.
We do. Perhaps you may not recognize our lingo. For example, around here we humorously refer to wheat as 'poverty grass' because there is no money in growing it but recognize it as a necessity to keep in the rotation for the ecological health benefits it provides.
Crop rotation seems to be pretty widespread. I remember as a kid learning about it and knowing I’d see different crops each year to help the soil for future harvests.
Crop diversity is great. And you also need lots of organic matter to go on top of the soil: to build life in the soil. that's much better than trying to duct tape the matter with fertilizer.
Crop rotation has been standard practice my entire life. One of the many kickers though is soybeans are the fallback crop for really wet springs. Many crops need to be planted by a certain date or the growing season will be too short. Soybeans can "make up for lost time", so to speak. If your first planting gets flooded, or if it's too wet to get any crop in, you can wait until it's dry and toss in some soy to recoup some of the cost. Thing is soybeans use a lot of nitrogen.
Many years ago one of my neighbours tried not rotating is crops. It worked out okay the first couple of years, but it wasn't long before his yields nosedived and within the five years he was bankrupt.
My family's been farming corn on corn for 20+ years. Started strip-tilling in the 80's High residue fields help trap as much moisture as we can with limited irrigation capacity. Farmers have no choice but to take care of their soils to remain viable. And more than viable, be profitable as there are many people who depend on them both for their livelihoods as well as an ever demanding population with mouths to feed.
