came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]

capital formations have been relocating south for a bit now and bringing their cheap labor demands. there’s a Who Makes Cents pod on the phenomenon and it’s impact on US internal migration / interview with a book author. pretty sure it was released in 2024. I can look it up if anyone is interested.

I think anybody who is able should be swimming in the opposite direction as hard as they can, but capital has a gravitational pull that can uproot people and move them against their impulses.

there are also a big chunk rich, older morons from the northeast corridor who think “me get big house in sunshine” and go no further. they need maids and egg salad sandwiches and new sliding glass doors and pill dispensers and butt wipers.

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.

his ultimate would be popping up in mid screen with prompt text saying, “It looks like you’re trying to lose at smash bros” and then all the other characters are rearranged and stacked like cascading windows + frozen with spinning hourglasses on them and clippy gets like 10 seconds to damage dump.

great pic by the AP, open mouthed, aggressive angry, pointing and the lighting makes his eyes look like empty sockets of vantablack space, where all love and humanity go to die.

lol, “looks like” just playin’

he’s a real VIKING of following the rules written by rich people!

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.

that post was maybe 1500 words to summarize 100+ years of regional conflict with special attention on the last 10 years written in plain language. no special jargon or references to theoretical concepts. if that’s a “novel” for you, it definitely explains your grasp of this situation and affirms the critique that you are willfully ignorant and incapable of analysis beyond “russia bad.” and this is why people make fun of libs like you. many libs smugly dismiss conservatives as having “simple/childlike” worldviews and value systems. then they promptly adopt their own perfectly mirrored positions and petulantly stick their fingers in their ears like you’re doing here.

the word you are striving not to say is capitalism. capitalists did this to russians, using the playbook developed and advocated for by western institutions.

imagine ignoring the absolutely ruthless, western led cannibalization of the former soviet union and pretending history’s baseline started AFTER the largest decline of living standards in global history.

human trafficking, prostitution, alcoholism, food/energy insecurity, diseases of despair all exploded when the west forced capitalism and privatization onto the former soviet union in the immediate aftermath. Gorbachev thought he was going to get some easy-going nordic social democracy, but instead the west carved up their public sector like a christmas ham. maybe you were too young, but in the 1980s the propaganda portrait the west had of russian women were all heavy-set, ugly babushkas. suddenly, after 1989, the mail order beautiful russian bride phenomenon exploded. they were fleeing the gutting of the public sector and the shattering of the social safety net, which made it near impossible to raise a family in the eastern bloc without becoming a sex worker.

the west sponsored every retrograde nationalist reactionary psycho to undermine any hint of democratic resistance to economic liberalization schemes and bombed the shit out of infrastructure (Yugoslavia) whenever they could get away with it. the west has the most blood on its hands for the aftermath of the USSR, but people like you want to ignore those early days and then claim credit for the “winners” the west propped up in the aftermath of all that chaos. like a killer who torched a town but kidnapped a few kids and now touts his heroic rescue of them. the most ignorant and disgusting take.