Growing up in the 80s and 90s was to understand that the revolution had occurred long before you were born, but that its failure was the reasonable and correct outcome. The counterculture was too wild and wooly, drug-addled idealists playing sans-culotte, trying to tear down all the guardrails that were there for good reason, ever slouching towards Bethlehem for no good reason other than it was "far out, man".

Popular media reinforced this, the erstwhile wild and wooly drug-addled idealists themselves blushed a bit even as they wistfully recalled how simple everything seemed when they were young and naive. Caring about things and wanting to make the world better was safely relegated to a developmental phase of young adulthood. When you get older, you'll understand, they told us as they patted our heads.

Implicit in all of this is that while the counterculture had failed at almost all of its goals, we had achieved some state of synthesis between the freaks and straight society. We had settled on rational and inevitable new order where culture was more open and free but corporations were still free to make a profit off of it, and who could begrudge them this basic right, which after all was the common teat we all suckled at, freaks and straights alike.

Reaching middle age in the 2020s is to realize that all of that was complete and utter bullshit, and the world that you were born into and believed to be a stable compromise between revolution and the status quo was just a myth cooked up by the reactionaries, to soothe our addled brains and give us just enough to lose so that we will fall in line and accept the world as it is, and not trouble ourselves with such idealistic absurdities as imagining a better world.

It's an odd thing to realize that your entire life has been a slow march into revanchism, not to the status quo of the 50s and early 60s but to some darker fever dream of an imagined past order. At least in the 60s, the John Birch society was seen as a joke by most political thinkers. Now it almost seems quaint compared to the sudden ardor for full-throated fascism on the right.

Though to call it a "sudden" ardor is to fall prey to the propaganda I was reared on from birth. This was always the goal. Nixon wasn't inevitable. Reagan wasn't inevitable. For fuck's sake, Trump was not inevitable! These were all coordinated attacks on the part of the motherfuckers who have always been at the wheel and who constantly need to remind us that they have their foot on our necks.

And it worked. At some point in my 30s I slipped out of the notion that the world would inevitably become a better place in time and into the hope that at least I'll be dead before the shit really hits the fan. At 42, I don't really even have that hope anymore. This is how a hegemonic minority suppresses the majority of people who are their natural enemies, by squeezing out even the hope that things could get better, or at the very least, not worse.

I don't have a lot of hope to offer here, except to say that none of this is inevitable, it's being done to us. And for God's sake, don't let the motherfuckers win.

A four-year-old could imagine a better world than this.

"Britain had its problems in 2010 – not least the impact of the 2008 financial crash – but it had strong public services and a visibly improved public realm..."Broken Britain”, it turns out, was a [Tory] campaign promise.
Jonn Elledge catalogues 14 years of terrible Tory policies.

Polling stations are now open. You can finally do something about it.

#GTTO #GeneralElection #GE2024 #ToryBritain #UKPolitics

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/03/list-terrible-policy-conservatives-britain-2010?CMP=firstedition_email

The 'help to buy' scheme has been a disaster for pretty much everyone except the house builders; well there's a surprise.

More corporate welfare engineered by the Tories.

Oliver Wainwright sets out the details, much of which will be familiar to you... but we can expect more of the same nonsense from Labour who also appear committed to 'helping' house buyers.

Until this stops the dysfunctional & inflationary hose market will continue to wreck lives unabated!

#housing

https://www.theguardian.com/society/ng-interactive/2024/jun/21/help-to-buy-how-a-disastrous-tory-policy-blew-up-the-housing-market

An interesting video on why public transport in #Bristol is so bad, and what could be done about it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axumLsWKZ6s

The underground/overground tram/train option is an interesting concept, but I'm not sure what the likes of @reece would make if it, especially given his 2yo "Why You Shouldn't Put Light Rail in Tunnels" video.

Instead, the city council seems intent on adding roads with more express bus lanes that won't reduce journey times by much.

#Transit #Urbanism #PublicTransport

"There is a class of investors, and a type of wealthy sociopath, that wants to extract maximum value from their investments...it is an invasive species (which will) continue doing what it does, eventually choke out everything it can compete with or consume, and then starve itself in turn. For anything else to grow, anywhere, it is going to have to go." —David Roth, VICE

This piece is brilliant, but I'm so glad it includes those last 7 words. Those are the crux.
https://defector.com/the-coffee-machine-that-explained-vice-media