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Cake day: July 2nd, 2023

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  • Machinist@lemmy.worldtopolitics @lemmy.worldA Different Way of Being a Man
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    2 days ago

    Ehh. There is a particular sickness among white men. It’s a failure of masculinity. It’s also a failure by the Left.

    Men are screeched at about toxic masculinity, especially young men. Many societal ills are blamed on white men, (hell, I blame them, rightfully so).

    The Right welcomes them with open arms, tells them it’s a liberal conspiracy. It fills their heads with empty hate and silly alpha/beta crap.

    The Left says not much in the way of what positive masculinity should look like.

    Men experience heightened levels of anger, aggression, mature later, poor impulse control. This is a natural part of having a male hormonal system. Without a good support system and role models, this can lead to ugly places for young men. When it’s young white men, the Right scoops them up.

    The men that look like me, talk like me, have interests like me almost always have abhorrent political beliefs and are full of conspiracy theories. I’m a redneck and often hate my own people. It’s like the self hating Jews or black folks you hear about.

    Positive white masculinity is absolutely in crisis in America. I don’t know what the answer is, but it is absolutely a problem that affects all genders, orientations, and minorities. It’s a problem because white men hold so much power and will continue to have that power for a long time.

    The Right has won the hearts and minds of many white men. The Left needs to pull its head out of its ass and figure out a strategy to win back at least some of these men. It needs to help young white men grow into manhood in a positive way.



  • You have your religion. Your religion says it’s not ethical to kill animals. I don’t believe in your religion.

    Yup, omnivore. I’ve got the canines and binocular vision as well as the molars and gut to prove it. I like meat and vegetables. Your religion says it’s bad to eat meat. I don’t care about your strongly held beliefs: I think they’re a bunch of hooey.

    I have no ethical or moral problem with killing as I do it. It’s not wrong to kill animals and eat them.

    Hunting is pretty much built in to being human. It’s about the closest thing to religion I have left. Squirrel hunting is my favorite type of quarry. I get to sneak miles through the woods and explore.

    Other than a few vegans that actually do a lot of camping and hiking, I’m far more connected to nature, my place in it, and the effects of climate change than most vegans ever will be. My family and I moved 700 miles this summer. Climate change and the future of my children and maybe grandchildren was a big factor that drove the move.

    Again, you have strongly held religious beliefs that I think are bullshit. I also really dislike the sneering judgement I see so much of coming from your religion and people. It’s just like fundamentalist Christians in tone, stridency, superiority, and sanctimony. You’re not any better than me. You just believe some crap that I don’t. Again, just like the fundamentalist Christianity I grew up in. You know those televangelists that beg for money? That’s a mirror of the people you believe in. The people protesting outside abortion clinics? That’s your people with a different set of beliefs.

    As far as climate change and greenhouse gases go, yup. Major problem. I’m actually reducing my impact, but, unless we tackle the industrial sources, an individual’s impact is a drop in the ocean at the scales that we’re talking about. Also, meat taken by hunting is about as low impact as it gets. Especially venison.


  • Exactly.

    I enjoy hunting but I don’t glory in the killing. There is always a part of me that is sad when I kill. Even killing a rat or butchering a fish gives me a twinge. I don’t feel bad when I kill a mosquito, but do feel bad when I kill a black widow.

    If I raise an animal to eat it, it will be properly cared for and have a good life and as painless a passing as I can make it.

    When I take a picture of something I killed, I make sure blood or injuries are not visible. That is disrespectful to that life I took.

    I recently killed a groundhog because it was being a varmint and digging up the foundation of my garage and chicken coop.

    I tried to clean it so we could eat it, but must have hit the glands. The smell of the carcass was almost chemical it was so strong. They’re supposed to be good, but I’d never had to kill one. Harder to skin than a squirrel and they have super tough hide.

    I had to toss it and it bothered me. Even though it was being a varmint: to me it is ethical to kill a varmint and not eat it. However, you should make use of that life if you can.

    I killed a coon once as a kid and had to eat it after it was smoked. Not good. Never killed an animal again that I wasn’t going to eat except for varmints.

    Varmints are animals out of balance. Rats and roaches are almost always varmints. Spiders rarely are. Overpopulated deer are often varmints. A groundhog out in the woods is just a critter, a groundhog digging out my foundation is a varmint. Cats are varmints when they are feral and killing wild birds, especially ground nesting birds.

    Critters are animals in balance or domesticated.

    Varmints are also almost always a species of least concern.

    The environment would be in a much better place if people were more connected to their food.



  • It’s been a year or two since I played with OSS CAD/CAM. It was still heavily lacking. QCad is only 2d.

    I check it every few years hoping for improvement.

    FreeCAD UI was still so bad it was basically unusable and I could not wrap my head around it. Horrible interface and totally unintuitive. I’m still not sure how to take a simple linear measurement. Installed a plugin that sort of worked to measure. That crap was designed by aliens.

    The OSS CAMs can generate a tool path, but it is difficult and they aren’t feature rich. CNC programming puts food on my table and I need the speed and features of pro level software. If I was playing with a router and doing a lot of 2d stuff, I could make it work for that. Especially if my time didn’t matter.

    If Mastercam would just port to Linux I would happily switch.

    I’m a CNC programmer with enough computer programming knowledge to be dangerous but not actually contribute to the various projects out there. Sucks.

    I’ll have to throw qalculate on my computer and play with it. I’m actually rebuilding our new little farm right now and am taking a break from machining while I put our home right. If our savings hold out, I’ll be building my own shop.



  • It’s rare, in America, for there to be an actual stall. Food trucks or carts are much more common and serve the same function. Stalls can be found at festivals and fairs.

    Some of the best food comes out of food trucks. There’s a whole little culture around food trucks.

    I’ve seen stalls in other countries on TV. Anthony Bourdain, for instance. He seems to accept a certain amount of food poisoning and dubious ingredients. Some of it still looks really good.

    We also have the Tamale Lady phenomenon here. If you see a Hispanic lady or old man selling tamales out of a cooler, you better get some. They’ll be the best damn tamales you’ve ever had.


  • We try and only eat out as a treat. Almost all of our my meals are eaten at home as we work from home these days. Also, my wife is an amazing cook and her food is better than most restaurants. We usually have leftovers or a sandwich for lunch.

    I’m not familiar with your currency symbol? What country do you live in and are the health standards low enough that eating from a stall is a concern? That’s a different situation.

    I’m in the US, so food trucks, stalls and gas stations actually have decent standards. (Often, the cleanliness in these places is heads and shoulders above corporate chain places.)

    I learned to always check the bathroom of a restaurant. How clean they keep their bathroom tells you a lot about how they keep their kitchen. Small, family run, places tend to have the best food and the cleanest bathrooms, in my experience.





  • I didn’t read OP’s statement as racist.

    I think anyone with taste knows that a small non-chain restaurant, stall, or cart will have much better food than some corporate chain crap food made with industrially sourced ‘ingredients.’

    Personally, I’m always looking for the small restaurants that serve food on Styrofoam or paper plates. Bonus points if it’s attached to a gas station or the owner’s little kids are in the dining room or kitchen playing and coloring.

    Ethnicity doesn’t matter, it can be a barbecue joint or some sort of Asian culture I’m ignorant of.

    You see a little kid quietly coloring in a booth by themselves, you know that shit is going to be good.




  • Went to highschool in an Alabama school. Football is a religion, and the football coaches were given the respect of preachers. They were also given cushy teaching jobs like health or drivers ed. They were generally not very bright.

    The school might be run down and underfunded, but the football field was immaculate with huge bleachers, the locker rooms were nice.

    In contrast, I had one coach teacher that taught history. Baseball coach. He taught me to love history. His tests were almost all long answer, didn’t care about dates. He wanted you demonstrate understanding of the causes and results of events. Brilliant man with deep knowledge and love of his subject.

    Got tired of the two week long headaches and quit football, switched to cross country even though I wasn’t built for it. Forget the term, but my body type is large muscles and bones.

    Had a cross country coach. He didn’t care if you won races or were able to be very competitive. He just expected you to do your best and would push the hell out of you. I saw him take lots of fat little freshman and turned them into lean endurance machines over several years. Don’t remember anyone ever quitting the team. I will always remember him leaning out the window of his 60’s pickup yelling at kids to push through and push harder. He was poor, shitty salary, tires on his truck were bald and leaky, he had screws in them he couldn’t remove cause they would go flat.

    Those two men earned the title of Coach in my life.



  • Yeah, it’s sick. I’ve always been amazed by how many people actually believe the company line and feel intense loyalty.

    Once worked at a place that required everyone to show up 1.5 hours early to watch a video from the CEO cheerleading about “rationalizing” plants. Rationalizing was code for layoffs. Then they gave us buttons to wear about it. I tossed the first one in the urinal, real proud that there was a pile of them at the end of the day.

    I think it’s normal and human to appreciate hard work and dedication. That drive makes us survive. Then it gets used as bait, the hook goes in, and people misplace that drive onto something inhuman. I guess it’s a successful strategy if you’re a no soul snake.