came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]

the only people who know how to torrent are the ones that want to learn. the learning curve is gentler than a walk-in shower. I’ve shown people of all ages and all tech backgrounds, though recommending VPN connections and getting that going does throw a few.

anyway, it’s so easy, it’s crazy compared to the old days of usenet, ZIP disks, ftp sites, .is files, and sequenced RAR files. this is the golden age of piracy and I love it.

cockpit lightly shat in. as is. will consider trade for a 1988 Ford Festiva and a collection of cassingles.

socialism is when I listen to NPR. capitalism is when I go to my parent’s house for Christmas. communism is when I get to program the radio presets in mom’s Honda Odyssey. social democracy is when I go to Starbucks. liberalism is when I look through the LL Bean catalogue.

you sound like you are entangled in several MLMs.

was just joking around with a sibling about how some of the most intensely “being highly intelligent is my identity” people from high school with supportive families grew up to be dumb as hell.

the gifted valedictorian became a nurse, then went full “iraq had WMDs, but it was classified” chud, quit the workforce to have 4 children, is a god-tier horder with rooms full of actual garbage, and now is entangled in several MLMs shoveling a spouse’s very high income into a blackhole.

the “actually, i have a 160 IQ” inherited a bunch of $$, bought a bunch of vehicles, had 5 kids, went full blown “dance mom” facebook+social media freakshow, and spends most of their effort trying to cultivate inappropriate relationships and fabricate dramas with other married spouses in their neighborhood.

excellence and success are subjective. a life of curiosity, personal enrichment, family, and friends can be excellent without needing accolades or other features of careerist striving. but i’ll be damned if some really “smart” people don’t take their potential and, in defiance of the odds, turn it into a shit smoothie.

being dumb is exactly how you got where you are.

having a PhD doesn’t mean you think critically or can evaluate literature anymore. and it definitely does not give you license to kick out of your coverage, like you’re trying desperately to do here…

having your little credential just means your committee wanted you gone after 5 years of being an asshole and didn’t want to fuck the stats of whatever shit tier program’s orifice you oozed out of.

where i grew up in burger land, back in the 80s, the public schools were teaching us all spanish in from age 5 to 10. not like true bilingual education, but we had a spanish class once a week. it last about 2 years before the white nationalists–who panic at the idea of working class people easily communicating with each other–got it shut down. between that and some years working with seasonal agricultural workers practicing their english, i am at the comprehension level of an inebriated toddler. i wish i had more opportunities to practice. honestly, the US should have all its signs in english and spanish anyway, but you know the reactionaries would go info a full blown pogrom over even a whiff of that being proposed.

i remember some small business tyrant in florida in the 2000s called up my work one time and wanted me to pass along his complaint to my boss that our phone system had an option to “press ocho for espanol”. he said that our company even offering the option to “those people” was wrong… in FLORIDA… the state with the name that means “land of flowers” in spanish.