Michael Bates: December 2024 Archives

How To Save Pepper Seeds - Pepper Geek

Some useful articles for growing and using peppers -- saving seed, growing peppers in pots, pickling, dehydrating, and freezing.

On Millennial Snot - by Dudley Newright - The Upheaval

Smarm, snark, and snot: Why millennial political discourse is so juvenile. "The obsession with data is a pretext for the reality of the liberal position, which is that any grievance expressed in terms that lie outside the current window of acceptable liberal discourse is simply not valid - it's false consciousness, it's mis/disinformation, it's problematic, it's stochastic terror. Political difference is a matter of some people being incorrect - If you only possessed the right knowledge, saw the right charts, the right facts, you'd change your mind. Political conflict, to the modern liberal, is not about struggle for finite resources, insoluble moral differences, or fundamental divergences in our conception of what America ought to be. It's only a failure of half the country - a bunch of dumb hicks - to know what's good for them. The grand liberal challenge has been recast as an effort not to improve the material conditions of the unwashed masses "clinging to their guns and religion," but to enlighten them so hard that they rewire their minds. Compromise is now impossible, because only one position is correct. And when reality does not comport with the liberal worldview, when data fails to tell the story liberals want to tell, when the chuds stubbornly refuse to get with the program, the only tactic that remains is policing group boundaries via shame and ridicule of the outgroup. If I can't persuade you to agree, I'll publically humiliate you until you learn your lesson."