Gluten positive and Y2K compliant.
Minneapolis, MN
Joined July 2009
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Mark Fox retweeted
Although I'm a nobody on X with very few followers, I just thought I'd point out that if we just stayed on Standard Time it being dark at 5 PM tomorrow wouldn't be as much of a shock because we'd have been naturally acclimating to it since the middle of June.
Mark Fox retweeted
everything you love about trains is a dedicated lane and a vehicle that shows up every 5 minutes. neither requires steel wheels. a bus with its own lane and signal priority is a train on a paint budget instead of a tunneling budget, and you keep insisting the wheels are the point
Mark Fox retweeted
Everybody wants to go back in time and kill Hitler, but nobody seems to want to go back in time and accept Hitler to art school instead.
Mark Fox retweeted
In the 70s, 80s and 90s the IRA would put up "Snipers at Work" road-signs throughout Northern Ireland where they had shot Police and Security forces previously.
The Army and Police considered this a core concern to take these signs down so that lawlessness would not be perceived to rule throughout the 6 counties.
So the IRA booby-trapped them, rigged them with explosives, and set up sniper hides viewing the various signs.
.
Ultimately if people keep tearing down the Flock Cameras, and Flock keeps putting them up it will escalate to one or the other sides booby trapping them. And then that side will win.
Likewise the first wave of Speeding Cameras in Arizona in the 2000s was stopped when they were shot out, and then the Technician ambushed and shot (and badly wounded) when he came to repair the cameras.
A $2500 Camera, or the risk of getting caught in minor vandalism, is nothing compared to the roughly $5-10 million cost (according to actuaries) of a western human life. One could be put up, or taken down over 1000 times and not be equivalent to one lost technician or vandal.
Violence is the supreme authority from which all authority is derived.
Ultimately all political struggles are solved by one side or the other escalating to sufficient violence to break the other, or exhausting them with low level violence.
Nowhere is this more dramatic and apparent than these lone low cost assets scattered throughout the countryside... Both sides can put them up and take them down in infinite numbers. Both sides can do this for years or even decades... Yet whenever one side escalates to lethal force, suddenly these things tend to be decided one way or the other.
Mark Fox retweeted
Please stop making everything digital.
I want ticket stubs, handwritten letters, and a shoebox full of memories to open at 80.
Mark Fox retweeted
It's okay not to have an opinion on whatever has the current attention of the zeitgeist.
Mark Fox retweeted
We are living through a moment where a group of people do not just disagree, they do not even acknowledge a shared fundamental reality.
There is no common frame of reference, no mutual set of facts from which discourse can even begin. They can watch the same video, from multiple angles, and walk away convinced they saw a completely different event.
They exist inside a narrative so deeply entrenched that to question it, to even acknowledge a contradiction, is to commit some sort of ideological treason.
This is a deliberate, conditioned immunity to contradiction. It is a cultivated resistance to evidence. They have developed a mind so thoroughly welded to its chosen reality that it will alter, discard, or fabricate whatever it must to maintain coherence.
They can be shown, in real time, the unraveling of their worldview, and they will patch over the holes with fantasy rather than face any doubt whatsoever.
Politics has turned knowledge itself into a partisan weapon. The expectation is no longer to seek truth, but to defend your team at all costs.
There is a lingering obligation to have an opinion on everything, to be informed at all times, to adopt the correct stance. And so, they improvise. They adopt prefabricated opinions handed down by their faction. They fill in the gaps with instinctive loyalty rather than demonstrating any semblance of independent thought.
The game is rigged, and they know it. Two parties, two choices, two sides that everyone is herded into, and neither is worth the loyalty demanded of them.
But to acknowledge this would be to admit powerlessness, to admit that they are trapped in an illusion of choice. So they cope. They retroactively justify their allegiance by turning their side into something righteous, infallible, and necessary. The alternative is too terrifying.
It is a coping mechanism turned mass psychosis. And it is escalating. When reality itself is dictated by allegiance, when loyalty outranks reason, when every fact must be bent into submission to fit the tribe’s chosen narrative, the outcome is inevitable: war.
When factions exist in separate realities, they cannot coexist. They cannot negotiate, they cannot reason, they cannot even comprehend the other side as anything but a threat.
This is irreconcilable. We cannot function like this. A society cannot sustain itself when its people are no longer individuals but ideological husks, possessed by abstractions, fighting battles for masters who do not even know their names.
You are not your faction. You are not your party. You are not an extension of a collective mind.
The moment you outsource your thinking, the moment you allow yourself to believe that your side must be right because the alternative is unbearable, you have ceased to be an individual. You have become another interchangeable pawn in a game that does not need you to think, only to obey.
Wake up. This war for reality is not one you want to be drafted into.
Mark Fox retweeted
America and Denmark are both gonna feel dumb when all of a sudden a bunch of Somalis show up and buy Greenland with their sweet daycare money.
Mark Fox retweeted
Back in the 90s where digital cameras were not a common thing and there was a time my wife [girlfriend at the time] was trying to wrestle my film camera out of my hand as she didn't want me taking her photo.
During the scuffle, I managed to get a shot off.
She's laughing, her hair is an absolute mess, the angle is terrible, the flash is right in her face.
But it is my absolute favorite photo I have of her. Just thinking about it brings me joy because I clearly remember the event.
That's actually a negative about digital. Back when film was king, you couldn't just take 300 pictures & pick the 42 of them that were good, thus you had to be a little more intentional about the shots.
And because of this, the photographs were much easier to attach to a memory and thus could cement that memory in your head.
Now we digitally capture every minute of our lives and don't commit those special moments to memory, assuming we can just replay it when we see the image again.
Good luck finding it in the millions of shots you have.
Mark Fox retweeted
“late-stage capitalism.” The phrase whispered by those who spent decades begging the state to interfere in every market, regulate every exchange, and tax every success, only to discover that when the state intervenes, it intervenes for someone.
You demanded control, and you got it. You insisted no business be left unregulated, no wealth untaxed, no profit unscrutinized. Then, when the politically connected used that power to serve themselves, you looked around and said, “See? Capitalism.”
How curious.
You see subsidies, bailouts, favoritism, political lobbying, and legal loopholes, and cry, “This is the market run amok.” But it was not the market that created these tools. It was the state. And it was created at your request.
When a man builds a dam and floods the village, do we blame the river?
Capitalism has no stages. It does not mature into corruption. It does not transform into a plutocracy. It simply withers as you chip away at it. Law by law, tax by tax, decree by decree, until the only thing left is the name, which you then use as a scapegoat.
And while you curse the rich and demand more controls, the bureaucrats you empowered grow richer still. Then you propose more of the same and call it progress.
No sir, this is not late-stage capitalism. This is early-stage authoritarianism politely disguised as fairness.
But please, do tell me again how freeing people to trade peacefully is the root of all evil.
Mark Fox retweeted
The most important thing to remember in urban planning is that everyone is a childless 32 year old tech industry drone who works at a downtown highrise office
Mark Fox retweeted
It’s okay to be sad that Hulk Hogan and Ozzy Osbourne died… but take a minute to be glad too, glad that you’ve lived long enough to see the larger than life figures you watched on your televisions and read about in the magazines grow old and die as is the nature of things. Remember what they were to you once, and understand that where you are in life now is in many cases where THEY were in life when you marveled at them. Whether it’s in a small way with your family or in a huge way on the national stage it’s up to you to carry on the memories of what they were to you and do your best to try to be that person for those in your life in your own way.
What the people we looked up to in our youths ACTUALLY were in their day-to-day lives in many ways doesn’t matter, it’s what they presented to the world and what they meant TO US that matters in the end. Remember that and try in to be that, a larger then life character who models something important whether its strength, standing up to authority, or kindness… or maybe all rolled into one.
One day draws to a close and a new day dawns, take what you’ve learned from those you looked up to long ago and try to bring that same light forward for the next generations as best you can. In the end that’s what life is all about.
Mark Fox retweeted
Corporations are the creations of the state.
In a free market, they wouldn’t exist.
