happybadger [he/him]

Cargo ships are your cheapest paid option. I’ve yet to do it, but contact the shipping companies and see what their passenger policies are. There are also shipping agents who coordinate with those companies as intermediates.

There’s also the potential of crewing a small boat if you have any skills or show them you want to learn fast. I did a lot of sailing around Panama just by sitting in a marina at either side of the canal and chatting with people who are about to sail somewhere. The work was either poorly paid ($50-100 per day) or free in exchange for a bed and food. For transatlantic/transpacific sailing though, I don’t know if you’re going to find as many yachters as I did who were just sailing in the Caribbean. That’s also a fun option if you want to build those skills since they need a certain number of crew to even transit the canal and they’re all going somewhere after.

edit: And for the latter you’ll also have luck on boater forums. I can’t remember which I used, but there was a designated subforum where people would post if they have or want crew work specifically for linehandling.

“But you didn’t” is such a powerful idea in art. The only reason European artists aren’t stuck in strict biblical representation with church-approved colours is that people pushed boundaries. The modernists rejected boundaries altogether and embraced pure creativity to such a degree that their own audience couldn’t recognise it as art. I’ve seen that same Malevich painting in the MoMA and that’s revolution. That’s a communist rebelling against centuries of only realistic paintings of idyllic landscapes and aristocratic portraits being taken seriously. He’s saying a red square is art for the sake of creative expression, an idea that would mature into “common people are alienated from art which is restrained to a professional class. Everyone should be entitled to its production and consumption” with proletarian art. He destroyed the idea of subject as a model of patronage as much as he did as a creative restraint.

Art should do that. It shouldn’t just have a message, but a call to some greater action that enables better art. We wouldn’t have modern music without Wagner violating the tonic as the most sacred principle of European music. Modern music, and especially classical music, is fucking beautiful in completely new ways because someone had the courage to reject centuries of what Serious Adults said was beautiful.

I use two definitions for the two broad intellectual trends in art over the past century:

Robert Hughes on modernism- “the shock of the new”

David Harvey on postmodernism- “The reduction of experience to a series of pure and unrelated presents”

AI fundamentally can’t create modernist art because it recombines what already exists into a crude 3rd stage simulacrum. You’ll never see genuine brilliance from how we understand AI. It’s incapable of creating a new perspective, new consonance out of dissonance, or a societal transformation through art. If the world is a shared historical trajectory where we’re discovering the same common thing, AI doesn’t participate in that. It has no investment in the nature worship of art nouveau or the class politics of constructivism or the physics of cubism. It can’t overcome the 1936 standard of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction when he was only describing crude printing presses.

AI can create postmodern art but only because postmodernism is ideologically, historically, and financially flattened into artists as bourgeois bloggers. If the world is nothing but commodified individual commentary in a marketplace of ideas with the most valuable commentary coming from wealthy failchildren, AI is a wealthy failchild that can also regurgitate what it learned from scraping art school data while still staying tailored to market preferences.

I don’t personally value the latter or see it as anything more than a counterrevolution against the future we lost in the mid-20th century. There’s no reason I’d ever pay for an AI image if I can generate a more personally-tailored version instantly for free using the same IP it recombined to shit out. It’s inherently Thomas Kinkade kitsch but somehow less valuable because they don’t even pretend to involve creative labour in it.

The only good work environment I’ve had was a municipal parks department. Not even unionised, paid $17/hour for the same work I could get $25-35/hour for at a private landscaper, no benefits for seasonal workers and few super-competitive permanent roles. But in decoupling from the profit motive, production became based on need rather than financial goals. I worked so much harder than I would at a private company because building a public pollinator garden is ecologically critical work that educates people on important things. Clearing snow at 4am in -10c weather was something I did until the point of exhaustion because I use those same bike trails and sidewalks the moment I get off work and each bike is one less car that might kill my neighbours. I got to do eco-Marxism without having to use any of the vocabulary alongside a mixed bag of liberals and radicals who intuitively understood those ideas through observation.

With strong unions and outright syndicalism, that kind of nuance returns to the incentive structure. Its productivity based on socio-ecological need instead of production for profit. We cared about getting people their 40 hours per week and if you came up 5 hours short you’d get paid to study and design sustainable landscapes used by your neighbours. If you needed time off you got it, if you needed a break you took it. You got to spend all day making beautiful de-alienating things for your coworkers, wildlife, and community. When my neighbours hold the power instead of owners and shareholders, it’s so much easier to convince them that doing A instead of B will improve our shared conditions.

The largest arboriculture company here is employee-owned but not unionised at a national level. Their stock isn’t publicly traded and each year the permanent employees get to buy shares with a certain percentage of their income. That access to stock options increases with your rank. While they’re the only arborists I’d want to work for and set the industry standards for safety, I don’t like two things about that:

1. Seasonal employees don’t get stock options, nor do new employees without like a year under their belt. This concentrates the internal wealth of the company in upper management and senior employees, making the incentive structure represent them instead of Joe Schmuckatelli risking their life 30m up with a chainsaw.

2. The incentive structure is the same as a public company as a result of that. Make number go up so you get dividends at the end of the year. The only way to make number go up is to do more with less. Productivity is in direct contrast to the welfare of workers because they don’t have a union to represent their safety or rights. If I get a small bonus every year from dividends but I spent that year risking my life unnecessarily to boost the stock price, it’s just gambling on Russian roulette.

Tesla having an oligarchical stranglehold over US EVs is why I can’t affordably own a better brand like BYD. If you want to be idealistic about Tesla’s supposed climate change role, explain it to me in the context of The Purpose of a System is What it Does. Tesla uses public funds to make luxury cars while suppressing the EV industry through its proprietary infrastructure, obsession with private transit, and government influence. The Boring Company is a direct response to California trying to implement high speed rail so that the wealthy don’t have to share space with workers.

Of course I negatively judge someone for owning one. If it’s a cybertruck, they’re feral and I write them off as a member of society. Electrification is dead on arrival as long as they exist.

I think horticulture programmes are drastically underrepresented. It’s one of the most interdisciplinary sciences that you can use to teach pretty much anything. In studying the dialectics between organism and environment I could teach every component of those interactions from soil to sky. Plants are deeply political and a great platform for left-urbanism, socioeconomics, and historical materialism discussions. Operating a greenhouse is an education in several trades, while being able to grow a plant builds important life skills. It’s an excuse to take city kids into nature and show them why it’s worth defending.

Three things stand out to me:

1. The disparity between military and civilian certifications. If you’re a mechanic on a specialised machine, it’s easy to become a DOD contractor on that same platform. If you’re an officer, you can say you’ve managed X people. If you’re a medic, your scope of practice is command-by-command. You might work above an LPN level but leave the military with an NREMT EMT-B certification at most which qualifies you for a minimum wage job way below your scope of practice. There are only a handful of slots for advanced schools that give you any worthwhile certification, and the paperwork required to become an LPN ($55k/year~) is very difficult to amass. If you’re a machine gunner, you spent 4+ years mastering a skill that doesn’t transfer to any civilian job and you can only sell yourself as a whipped horse with a broken back.

2. Military culture itself is traumatic. It’s closer to feudalism than it is anything in the civilian world. There’s a rigid hierarchy and set of standards for every aspect of your life. You have a pathological obsession with being 15 minutes early because your lord can have you arrested if you don’t do everything perfectly. You’re supposed to embrace the toxicity of every part of your day, much less being a cog in the demon machine that hates you as much as it does its victims, and tie your self-worth to that scripted performance. The outlet for dealing with any of that is alcoholism and/or smoking. You can’t afford or make the time for civilian therapy, while military therapists are inquisitors that can have you arrested or end your career.

3. There’s no blueprint for civilian life. The allure of military life is that you know exactly what every expectation is. You can turn your brain off because you know what to wear and how to wear it, what to do and how to do it, and how doing A will result in B for your career. Your chain of command is a line of narcissistic older siblings and parents strictly directing you down that path. You have that stick incentive of being arrested if you violate any part of the carrot plan. All of a sudden you’re removed from that very traumatic environment and it’s replaced by a much more abstract system where nobody follows the rules you’re conditioned into.

Maybe you make that deal with the devil knowing you’re a good fiddler and you get a golden fiddle for it. If you didn’t explicitly do that for that reason and get the right paperwork for that goal, you leave with nothing and probably hate the field you were trained for but not meaningfully certified in.

Even if I wasn’t an absurdist at a universal atheistic level, it’d be hard to be a communist without being an absurdist at the societal level Camus is writing at. Trench warfare and line go up and electoralism are absurd things which drive you crazy enough to believe in them if you can’t admit how arbitrary and meaningless they are. When you break from that idealism, Camus has the right confrontational framework for what comes next.

https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil360/16. Myth of Sisyphus.pdf

All Sisyphus’ silent joy is contained therein. His fate belongs to him. His rock is a thing Likewise, the absurd man, when he contemplates his torment, silences all the idols. In the universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd man says yes and his efforts will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is, but one which he concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, he knows himself to be the master of his days. At that subtle moment when man glances backward over his life, Sisyphus returning toward his rock, in that slight pivoting he contemplates that series of unrelated actions which become his fate, created by him, combined under his memory’s eye and soon sealed by his death. Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a blind man eager to see who knows that the night has no end, he is still on the go. The rock is still rolling.

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain! One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

The gods cursed us to roll a rock up a hill. We don’t know why and they probably don’t either by now. I push the rock because doing so makes me hate them more effectively and at some point I might become strong enough to kill them for that. If I was arbitrarily born into 18th century France and my rock was to starve for the aristocracy, I’d push it because there’s a guillotine over the horizon. I’m arbitrarily born into the late 20th century and my rock is to starve for the corporate aristocracy, I push it because I or someone like me will get to turn their bunkers into brazen bulls. At no point in history could I have been born without some rock to push and it’d always mean existential damnation for me, but I’d purify my hate pushing it.

Can I adopt you as my second-favourite dog? You aren’t as smart as mine but you’re loyal to a fault and I wouldn’t feel bad at that final vet visit.

I’m so glad we aren’t federated with such fucking losers.

Ban it outright in the rules of individual instances, bully AI piglets for printing the lowest-value content online in the same way NFT goobers are ostracised, run AI image and writing detectors on suspect posts. The common denominator of any AI post is that it’s going to be shit and it should just be treated like someone repeatedly posting a Lorem ipsum copypasta or spam email.

Golf clapping is bourgeois. I believe in the communal patriotic 10 minute standing ovation with everybody clapping at the exact same speed.

Laughing is bourgeois. I believe in the communal sensible chuckle.

Scientific proof of demons.

It’s the youtube algorithm wearing a skin suit to convince children to gamble.

Lemm.ee Nazis never disappoint. Print out your comment and choke on it so it has value.

Whoa there lil guy. Dogs don’t speak. You bark.

On second thought, this is as good as you get. I’d just give up.