luddybuddy

Butlerian Jihad now

Reading Giblin and Doctorow’s Chokepoint Capitalism and they used a term “freedom of contract” I hadn’t heard before, and which I realized that I have over-valued in my brain.

I’ve already broken through in a few spots, for instance employment contracts can obviously be exploitative and workers have little ability to negotiating the terms on their own.

Or bank loans, not because of the negotiation so much as the moral stigma attached to defaulting on loans. I can see that the bank took a risk, they can take the consequences too. Why add moral consequences to an action that already carries financial consequences?

I think this loans issue comes back to an association of business contracts with social promises, which I’ve spent some time breaking down.

The employment issue is another kettle of frogs. That comes back to consent and whether a person who is not entirely free can consent. I guess that’s the whole point of a revolution though. Any attempt to make contract law fairer to respect the fact that some parties are signing under duress will be thorny, because all people are under duress under capitalism.

There’s barely a question in there, but … thoughts?

Scrounging through my dad’s cast off tools, found this framing hammer. As I was never really strong enough to swing a 24oz framer when I was a carpenter, I never bought one (I used a 16oz hammer with a long handle, because m*v^2). Now that I have no use for it and am even weaker, seemed like a good time to take it home and give it a new, coddled life. Replaced dad’s splintered and grey handle with a brand spanking new one.

This is showing up everywhere, can’t be a coincidence!

Why do lantern flies congregate next to modern commercial buildings, specifically those with aluminum storefront system facades and black granite?

I just killed thirty in front of a high rise. The next block, a neoclassical building, had none. Crossed the street to a grocery store on the ground floor of another high rise and killed probably 40 in half the time.

Is it warmer at the base of these buildings? The two modern buildings faced each other so were in very different sun.

Hi folks, I stopped posting (not here, I never posted here) back in 2014 or so when my local DOT stopped being responsive to my incessant requests for better bike lanes and kept not posting as I slowly became overwhelmed with the constant stream of opinions from other white dudes clogging up all the tubes, but the fediverse is starting to coax me out of my shell. One of these days I might even manage one of these 'shit-posts' the youths are doing.

I'm an engineer (structural and software), and I live in a city in the US, and I ride bikes, work on my bikes, camp with my bike, and look at my bikes a lot. I'm into urbanism and transportation and other things that go hand in hand with riding a bike in a US city. I also make clothes and do some hand-tool woodworking, am weirdly into swords (it's not a good time to be a leftist sword guy on youtube, I tell you what). I belong to an industrial arts group, so if you're looking for space to make shit and you also happen to live in a city in the US then let me know, we like new people.

Politically, I read the Manifesto in high-school and considered myself a leftist but generally went along with liberal ideology for a long time, thinking markets are cool we just need better regulation, I'm sure we can vote our way out of this, if we all just had (business) unions everything would be fine, etc. Finally climate change, Black liberation movements, and yeah, Ol' Bernard started motivating me to peel back some of the cracking layers of contradiction in my ideology and read (or OK, listen to podcasters read) some theory. I feel better now.

Genderically, I chose comrade/them pronouns as I've long been pretty lukewarm about being a cis man. I felt some dysphoria around high-school and college but then I grew a big ass beard and just decided that my personal definition of masculinity was pattern baldness and a face rug, and I could perform whatever way I wanted and feel secure in myself. I've been shopping around he/they or various forms for a minute and figured the internet, and especially Hexbear, would be a fine place to pin one on for a while.

Sincerely, LuddyBuddy