Politics

When one side declares war, the war has started. Your refusal to fight back doesn't mean there's no war, it just means you're going to get fucking destroyed.

Americans feel poor despite being orders of magnitude richer than most others because our gov. cannot provide cheaper public options to costly private goods.

MLK, Jr. succeeded because he crafted his message for a broader audience. Today's protestors ought to learn from his strategy. Most folks aren't paying attention until extreme events happen. Don't give others the opportunity to paint you as an extremist when you're not.

yearly reminder everything looks exponential from the middle of a sigmoid

In any cause the undecided are who you have to convince. So if you actually care about the cause, you can't afford the luxury of despising them, regardless of how good it might make you feel.

What I think is a mistake is to inconvenience the public merely for the sake of inconveniencing them. If a big protest incidentally blocks traffic, that's ok. But a small number of people blocking traffic *in order to* inconvenience the public is a tactical error.

Europeans aren't poor. They are illiquid. Much of Europe's wealth is stored in safe streets, nice parks, public transit, "free" healthcare, etc. which, it turns out, are too socially expensive for Americans to maintain. Americans take the money instead. The rest is only natural.