absentbird

I wrote an alternate ending verse:

Man hands on misery to man
It lives on deep inside yourself.
Root it out from where you can,
And help the kids be someone else.

She's been pushing for a ceasefire since way before Biden supported it. I think her first calls for it came soon after the conflict started.

All I'm saying is that taxing the rich is good and necessary for as long as they exist. Sure, our current system is a disparity engine, but it's not impossible for us to dilute the effects of it with progressive tax policies, as has been done in years past.

Personally I don't see it as a choice of either tax the rich or abolish capitalism. I see the two goals as mutually connected to liberation and progress: tax the rich until we can replace the system with a better one.

Building coalitions around progressive policies within the current system can help shift more people into alignment with post-capitalist thinking. Fomenting divisions between socialists and progressives does the opposite; solidarity forever.

You don't have to go that far back to find a time when the rich were heavily taxed and income disparity was much smaller. Keep going back and you can find other times when the disparity was greater and the rich were taxed less.

The best outcome may require the system to be torn down, but it's clearly also possible to tax the rich significantly more even with the system already in place.

Noone has to do anything.

The original tweet essentially said that all women have a mission from God to use their bodies to make babies. At the very least it's a value judgment on how women live their lives.

There seems to be a sustained campaign against having kids.

I have never encountered this. There is absolutely a sustained campaign for bodily autonomy, and for the acceptance of people who choose not to reproduce; but I haven't encountered anyone talking like the original tweet, saying women have a mission from God to not have kids or something.

This is just fighting against the natural way of life.

Here we go again with imposing judgements on people who don't reproduce. I feel like that's the bigger 'sustained campaign' in this conversation. The natural way of life changes over time, it used to be natural to die young from a bacterial infection, or to have your village sacked by marauders. We don't need to have the same pressures to keep reproduction high as in the past. Populations are still increasing, but people are out here blaming women for not doing it faster? Just take a breath, it's going to be okay.

I think they're advocating that women can choose for themselves what kind of person to be, and the fact their bodies are capable of gestating new humans doesn't obligate them to do so.

It's sort of like how the fact a man's body may be capable of entertaining others by dressing their penis up in a tiny coat and hat doesn't mean we should bully an entire gender into making that the purpose of their existence, nor does it mean we're advocating for a world without sharp dressed dicks.

Let people live their lives based on who they are, not the abilities of their genitals.

Fair enough.

If you did like using straws you could just swipe some of the salt onto the rim of the straw.

V762 Cassiopeiae: am I a joke to you?

Why not just use the straw?

To each their own. Personally I can't stand MS Office, I think Google Docs is easier for most nontechnical people these days anyway. For the rare cases when Office is needed, the web version works fine on Linux.

LibreOffice works great, and WPS Office is proprietary but at least it's free.

Personally I write my documents in markdown and use pandoc to convert them into PDF or docx or whatever. It's like writing the source code and then compiling, I like it.

I'm sure you've looked into all that, but for anyone else who is interested in alternatives those are my recommendations.

Pfft, proprietary propaganda. How hard is it to let go of every app you're familiar with, learn half a dozen scripting languages, and memorize a hundred different commands in vim?

What you say is true, though I've become so jaded with Microsoft that I don't think there's any software or situation I'd use Windows for; I'd sooner switch to Mac.