Heavy tax breaks and assistance for co-housing and co-ops, especially at missing-middle size, and opening up careful mixed-zoning, is where municipalities can make a huge impact. Upper-income parochialism will blind most councils though.
Bring back federal funding for co-op housing!
My favourite interview of the week, she is hilarious.
She did it out of spite because people said she couldn’t. Nearly every answer is honest self-deprecation. One serious point she makes is that due to currents and other conditions she can’t be too proud, because every ocean swim is different.
edit: speling corection
An interesting and short article, and thanks for the summary.
I do think the author could benefit from less essentialism. It looks like a notable minority of any human population is biologically predisposed to an overactive amygdala and thus fear-based tendencies to authoritarianism and xenophobia. We need strategies, as societies, to protect these vulnerable folks from sociopathic cultural attacks on their sense of identity.
And yet, here we are: nearly everything we do is ideological in some fashion, willingly or not, aware, or not.
As Terry Eagleton wrote, "Ideology is like halitosis, it’s always someone else’s problem.
Mind you, he defines ideology as the way in which we participate in our own oppression. It’s a little more refined than the definition being used here, which is actually closer to “creed”.
I think Eagleton’s definition is more useful.
The rich get richer and the poor get roommates.
A standard tactic of the regressives is to claim that their right to advocate for oppression and unjust discrimination is equal in importance to freedom from said discrimination.
Hardly anyone seems to call this what it is: a grifter skimming off the top… of everything. The ultimate middleman. It’s a grab, not geopolitical.
Tax is a dirty word. Tarriff is a beautiful word. Spot the difference?
Buying clubs = buying bulk with friends. Save money and packaging, get better quality. More work because you are acting as your own casual retailer and have to manage storage and some paperwork keeping track of who got what, and placing orders.
Can be simple like going to Costco and splitting it with the neighbours. Easy and casual.
Can be complex like getting an account with a wholesaler and arranging orders and delivery/pickup once a month; usually requires a minimum of 6 or 10 households, and some good spreadsheet skills. Lots of volunteer hours.
Can spill over into food storage collaboration, like canning 20 crates of peaches that are ripe TODAY so you need a crew who want canned peaches for payment.
It isn’t always food. It can be lots of things. I know of 5 households who got together to buy an entire 20-ft shipping container full of solar panels. Cheap!
It can be housing. I am friends with a bunch of people who live in a 6-story building that they bought and built together, 20 apartments or so, and they made it the way they want, lots if amenities and shared spaces. Small kitchens so they can have one big awesome dining room and regular bulk meals, again, cheaply. Board games and couches scattered around.They built less parking than code required because a lot of them just use car co-ops. So they made a music room and workshop with the extra basement space.
Oh yeah, car-co-ops, and I guess tool co-ops too, are another kind of buying club.
If you ever have been in any kind of club, it’s kind of the same, just focused on saving money or keeping control over daily expenses.
Costco, is, at heart, a buying club. Your membership gets you in the door, but also gives you group purchasing power.
Extend that down to personal scale. Organize bulk purchases with friends, socializing while splitting up the loot. Vacuum seal, put things in jars and zipper bags, learn to can, and dehydrate.
Ask around once you get a fever for it, there are often more formal buying groups that are large enough to purchase wholesale. Don’t start one yourself at first, join one, as the logistics and spreadsheet action can be complicated. This is a really great way to afford higher quality organic food, for instance.
Buying bulk skillfully means a healthier diet, generally, as you get leas heavily processed foods on your menu. You also can massively reduce shit packaging.
Most of TFG’s legal troubles are related to financial fraud, especially real-estate related. It’s more projection.
Carpenter Media = foreign influence organization.
Why the Fuck are Canadians ignoring this shit?
Note how much of this oligarch’s stew is made of opinion shaping ventures.
You’d think. Maybe. We don’t know for sure. Thomas was a contemporary so same generation.
I’m butchering a 2 millennia story, but it illustrates how christianity fares in hinduism, and it even has some evidentiary support, so…
When the apostle Thomas was sent to India, he wound up in Cochin and began establishing a ministry or fellowship there.
He was frustrated by the lack of convincing required, or resistance to his ideas, without singular devotion.
The creator instantiating one more avatar is no stretch as Hinduism is pretty sophisticated in narratives, so Issa/Jesus just got added to the list that includes Krishna, and to this day you can buy hindu iconography with Jesus teaching compassion.
(Dude did succeed in forming a strictly Christian community though, and so arguably the oldest Christian sect is there.)
Fadear Creek Road, about 45 kilometres northeast of Kamloops.
Nah you are correct, but the autocorrect is 'murrican and gaslit me.
Well, yes and no.
Mass social change requires protests as a baseline of dissent. They should be menacing, but remain only a threat to power, which is their primary purpose. A non-peaceful protest is unskilled and uncoordinated use of violence,and gives authoritarians an alibi for escalating repression. This is why they send in agent provocateurs.
A march turned mob is a huge error. You need coordination and planning for revolutionary violence, even mass rebellion.
In between the necessary peaceful marches and that hopefully avoidable bloody rebellion, there is the opportunity for a lot of targeted activism, based on the leverage that the threat provides. It’s also a period of targeted sabotage and vandalism, as well as widespread passive resistance. More importantly, it is a delay in which to network, organize, and develop coordinated strategies. Fail to plan, plan to fail.
This way, there is a time tested path to rule by the people, AKA democracy, without violence. Failure of this method is the violent insurrection, which can lead to interesting things like Nepal (though the violence was VERY disciplined, despite appearances). It can also lead to Pol Pot.
Pol Pot killed 30% of the nation using words.
Facts.