Indeed, I left Reddit because it was clearly becoming another tool of manipulation. Facebook feed is very similar. I am not as politically left as a lot of Lemmy, but I am still on the left, and my Facebook feed ends up full of conservative propaganda.

Anyway, the only reason I still maintain a Facebook account is because so much of my local community/ county organizing ends up being done through Facebook. And at the end of the day, you are safer having a community than not, even if the oligarchs know who I know and what shoes I buy.

There are absolutely hiking groups. They’re are even hiking groups geared towards single people. I have friends that met SOs through them. Also, I think something like a book club would be most likely to be organized through another organization first (a large workplace, a Facebook group or Reddit sub geared towards a city/ county) that would start as a discussion forum and move on to in-person get-togethers.

And if you don’t come across any of those maybe you live in a small community and need to look within the next larger community. And don’t be afraid to organize it yourself. People like all those things (hiking, gardening, books). Also, re: nature and gardening, you can usually also volunteer with local nature preserves (our country has a local conservatory). Good luck out there!

Piling on to your hobbies beef, it also implies that you’re going to have hobbies that aren’t inherently gendered. I am not trying to be sexist at all or prescriptive about which hobbies people should engage in, I’m just going to issue an observation that all of my husband’s video gaming friends are men, and 80% of the people in my gardening groups are women. He’s also into music, which is probably more mixed, but everyone I talk to about books also ends up being women… But that could also just be the genre.

In your defense, and as someone who never really frequented a gym, why is it tacky to hit on someone at the gym? Is it because presumably people aren’t there to socialize? Are people there to be in their own head working out and pushing themselves?

Maybe it would be fine if you had some other interaction(s) first… Like if you offered to help spot them, or how to work a machine, or offered them a spare Gatorade, or were in a workout class together, etc.

Gawd I love this meme.

If it’s direct deposit, the $6k is probably for a two week pay period. That’s the standard for most corporations in the US. Withholdings, including taxes and retirement accounts and health insurance, is going to take roughly 1/3, so this guy is making $9k x 26 = ~$235k (probably more like $250k/yr).

Listening to A People’s History of the United States has been a revelation.

When wealthy people go move into walled off gardens, yes they price everything to keep people out. But in a mixed community, you end up with mixed and middle-of-the-road retail prices. We’re not talking about dropping two impoverished people into Park Avenue; we’re talking about a community that is reflective of the county’s socio-economic distribution.

Concentrating people of little means into a small area ostracizes them and removes them from areas with opportunity, arguably making them more desperate.

Poor people need to be mixed in with everybody else. The areas with the highest rates of social mobility in the US have the most mixing between classes. People in need will get support from people of means if they are seen as their neighbors and community members. And interacting with middle/ upper class families demonstrates to poorer kids how to manage money, how to seize opportunity, how to walk the walk and talk the talk of affluence, etc.

The US is lying through their teeth about Iran, but Iran is hardly a communist government. They’re a theocratic authoritarian regime. There is no diversification of power in their government. Roles and responsibilities may be delegated out, but ultimate authority rests with the Ayatollah.

If the men are also covering their hair (which is true of some middle eastern societies like the Berber people, traditional Qatari clothing, traditional Saudi clothing, etc, and Sikhs), then it’s not specifically ostracizing women in a society. But that is not true of traditional Muslim face coverings for women. And while I agree that there are plenty of sexist practices in Western society meant to hold women in their place, that hardly excuses the sexism practiced in much (not all) of modern Islam. Two things can be wrong.

Embrace of a belief system that teaches that women should have less rights and less agency is anti-feminist, even if that embrace is of a feminist’s choosing.

To be clear, I think the homes being made fun of in the original picture were supposed to be Western homes. They certainly look like many subdivisions in the US.

I haven’t actually seen propaganda about Soviet housing. The pictures you posted just look like the poorer areas of any western city. We stayed in La Mina (on accident) when we visited Barcelona. Your pictures look better than La Mina!

I don’t know about Tokyo or what the options really are for raising kids in Japan. But I think (I’ll join you here with spewing opinion/ conjecture everywhere) in the US a lot of people intentionally leave cities once they decide to have kids. When you are a young professional in your 20s, it’s still very popular to live in dense urban centers, but then as you get married and start having kids, the vast majority of people move out to the suburbs or more rural areas. Now, obviously this is a privileged class of people, and maybe there are different trends in socioeconomic classes above and below them. And perhaps they move out of the city for other reasons (the price of housing, the quality of schools, etc), but I think access to nature also plays a part. But I say this as a girl scout troop leader, so I’m definitely biased.

On the one hand, I guess it’s a more efficient packing of people into urban areas than having large green spaces. On the other hand, it’s fucking depressing, and I think kids miss something in childhood without psuedo wild spaces to go explore alone.

But how much can you really trust Spanish Leonardo DiCaprio?

What do you think the drones are for?