this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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the_dunk_tank

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It's the dunk tank.

This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.

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[–] [email protected] 90 points 11 months ago (3 children)

OMFG the only reason you get these sort of fast food/gas stations/middling hotel clusters is because they’re next to an INTERSTATE EXIT, placed there by CENTRAL PLANNERS. God these fucks are so baby brained that they think anything they like in society just exists naturally and not as the result of active planning and processes.

[–] [email protected] 60 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Wdym, the combination Pizza Hut/long John silvers/Taco Bell has existed out in the wild since at least 15000 BC

[–] [email protected] 47 points 11 months ago (1 children)

defend old growth strip malls

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

Some of the earliest forms of Sumerian writing were actually just people complaining about their order at Pizza Hut

[–] [email protected] 53 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

"Centralization is when everything looks the same."

Meanwhile you could uproot the buildings in that photo and plop them back down by some other highway interchange and absolutely nobody would notice the difference.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Not true! The signage would be wrong.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

how would anyone be able to tell? the sign says "springfield 11 miles". there's always a springfield.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is just "understanding history is marxism" again in the same veign as the ever popular "roads were always built for cars"

[–] [email protected] 16 points 11 months ago

i'm jus riffing here but i think in a sense history is a necessarily collectivist endeavor. it's memory at mass scale. the liberal subject has no use for causes and effects outside their own recollections.

[–] [email protected] 67 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I hate to tell Josn this, but that image was created by central planners. Urban planners decided how to zone that area and, most likely created an incentive for a gas station to sprout up right around there, from which they expected something like this to develop.
The urban planners just thought such a development was a good idea, as compared to the planners of Moscow, who thought greenspace and housing was pretty cool.
Both types of planner thought their type was the most "efficient". They just had different parameters for what efficiency meant.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Actually it's not central planning because any fast food shithole or gas station conglomerate could open a location on the lots allocated specifically to those types of businesses :smuglord:

[–] [email protected] 35 points 11 months ago

I wish a brutal accident upon your house Mr. Smug de Lorde

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (3 children)

there are a lot of places in America that lack central planning. Houston for instance is the largest area on earth without formal central planning, and that's why it's horrifying sprawl with highway access roads right in front of people's houses, or elementary schools built next to sulfur refineries

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian jingoism is going to change that.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

He's acting like he's looking at Hong Kong. I think his point is the "chaos and natural beauty of franchises vying for small plots" he thinks it isn't authoritarian somehow

Unless by authoritarian jingoism you mean using the term as an attack on the mindless foreigner drones

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

✍️✍️✍️

[–] [email protected] 57 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'd prefer this to a 15 minute city that KILLS CHRISTIANS

[–] [email protected] 49 points 11 months ago (3 children)

one of the corporations in this image, Exxon, is partially responsible for various genocides in the middle east and the American war in Iraq

another one of the pictured corporations, Sunoco, is owned by Energy Transfer. That's the company that owns the Dakota Access Pipeline. In 2016, police gave over 300 protestors hypothermia by spraying them with water hoses in sub-freezing temperatures.

Another depicted company is Shell, and they're Dutch so do I really need to say more

[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Shell is primarily British. ukkk which I think is probably worse on balance than the Netherlands!

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

All that pain, suffering and death... for this...

At least the pharaohs of old used to make something beautiful out of the suffering of those they exploited.

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[–] [email protected] 44 points 11 months ago (2 children)

As Jordan Peterson once said:

"Sorry. Not Beautiful. And no amount of authoritarian tolerance is going to change that."

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago

Young men come to me with tears in their eyes, they say they searched "European bikini mall" and it just rips them up inside

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

I get what Preston meant by "authoritarian tolerance" but seeing him string those two words together still makes me laugh

[–] [email protected] 39 points 11 months ago (1 children)

What’s missing is the 2 mile long line of people waiting in their cars for the food bank because they’re excited for the chaos of the market

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago (2 children)

2 mile long line of people waiting in their cars for the food bank

but muh soviet bread lines

[–] [email protected] 36 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Fun fact: there was a famine in the USSR immediately following WWII. But after that, “bread lines” weren’t really a thing in the USSR until the late 80s, when Gorbachev threw a bunch of market reform monkey wrenches into the works which directly caused the “bread lines”.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Those were bad because they didn't have to pay for the bread

[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago (2 children)

I had a roommate who was homeless for 20 years prior who made a Soviet bread line comment. I pointed out you gotta wait in line to buy bread anywhere, at least this was free, that totally changed his tune. He didn't know it was free bread. This was a dude who knew to get up early on Sundays cause churches did free meals those days and he'd go church to church, pack up those meals and store em in the fridge and that was his meals for the week. Once he realized it was a less painting the ass version of what he was doing and also guaranteed on not reliant on churches that he wasn't too into he changed his attitude immediately. It's amazing how anti communist propaganda makes something pretty normal into some sign of dystopia.

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[–] [email protected] 37 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

This American humaaaan city is quite similar to the ones we have on Ferenginar. quark

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[–] [email protected] 33 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

Love the idea that this shit is the equivalent of a bustling Byzantine marketplace

Sure it might lack the closeness, the public space for walking, the people talking and haggling, the smells and the displays, but it has the only thing that is truly valuable about a marketplace which is shit being sold in it

[–] [email protected] 30 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

This photo is exponentially more beautiful than anything posted by bluechecks

PIGPOOPBALLS

[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Red team said thing bad. It good! Me blue team!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago

American politics in a nutshell.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 11 months ago

I can both smell and hear this picture and they're both unpleasant and repugnant.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago

Wait until he finds out a lot of Western Capital cities like Washington DC and Paris were largely the result of central planning.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 11 months ago (4 children)

I don’t think anyone should Trust the underlying motivations of anything Carlson ever says, but this wasn’t too bad, and will resonate with the working class’ lived experience, so, may Eakle’s rebuttal fall on deaf ears.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is how you can tell he is a fascist, when right wingers coopt leftist language you need to start lifting weights

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

yeah, the trick they always pull is reducing practical criticisms to pure aesthetics. human misery can only be understood through the perpetuation of ugliness. if the misery at hand is beautiful, then it's acceptable to them.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I listened to it and got bamboozled when they started making the entire spiel about ugly dollar store buildings. Like a classic case of "YOU WERE ALMOST THERE THEN YOU VEERED INTO THE FUCKING DITCH" with a healthy dash of "JESSE WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT"

And then giggled at tucker saying "I don't know what you'd call me because I'm criticizing capitalism in America, a socialist" or something along those lines. Partially because I would never put tucker and socialist in the same sentence nor did I ever thing I'd ever hear someone do that much less Mr. Swanson chicken nuggies himself.

Also giggling at the horrific thought that Mr. Fucker might be trying to triangulate himself into making Maga communism a mainstream thing among his herd of hogs. My brain is painfully tingling in trying to parse through that sentence like a hamster on a wheel spinning so fast it trips up and goes spinning with the wheel and gets yeeted out of it

[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago (8 children)

If anything Tucker’s position is a Red Toryism variant. Hierarchical society with white Christian patriarchy at the top, but that patriarchy controls the market as to ensure the traditional family unit is protected.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago

Tucker Carlson is absolute cynical swine who believes in nothing other than making money and having an audience. He's doing the same thing that always happens to ousted conservative pundits/politicians, he's trying to triangulate on something that would make him an outsider but still resonate with hogs. And since he'll never be allowed back into the FoxNews fourth estate club, this is the only option he has. He can't keep being the same old Tucker, there are a million of those. He's gotta position himself as somehow different than those standard TV media people.

i think sometimes people here forget how big Tucker was. He was getting 4 million people watching him per night, and then tens of million more would watch clips of his on Facebook or whatever. He's not getting those sorts of numbers back unless he starts getting wacky with it

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

one of the replies is the Mises Institute arguing that poverty is caused by not having gold backed currency I am going to bite my own face off

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (2 children)

I remember some discourse where if you zoom out it's not an urban hellsprawl and it's actually like a haven for truckers/people going long distances on an interstate.

You can still argue that it's an ugly aesthetic. It's gross and gray with logos everwhere. Everything that nature isn't touching is ugly in this photo. A big honking cafeteria with some central space and a park would look infinitely better. You could put workout equipment to stretch your legs and pump the heart during a long trek and it would be like a literal sanctuary. Each restaurant has to reinvent the wheel and atomize everyone with their own building instead of just getting one janitorial service, one sequestered building, and leaving a whole lot of space for not advertising and not individual parking lots. There's no place to sit or exist unless you're spending money. The most beauty around you are the vistas full of things that people didn't build. The American mind can no longer imagine a public space used for something besides commerce. You can have all your competition and civil religion in the cafeteria. For as far as this picture is concerned it can even facilitate competition by helping truckers. It just doesn't have to contribute to making hell on Earth.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago

There’s a handful of those places minus the gym. Vince Lombardi service area in Jersey comes to mind. It still ends up being kinda dumpy just because of all the cars, and the space required to accommodate them. What you’re describing is essentially a mall in miniature

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!

It isn’t fit for humans now,

There isn’t grass to graze a cow.

Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens

Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,

Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,

Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-

A house for ninety-seven down

And once a week a half a crown

For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin

Who’ll always cheat and always win,

Who washes his repulsive skin

In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak

And smash his hands so used to stroke

And stop his boring dirty joke

And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add

The profits of the stinking cad;

It’s not their fault that they are mad,

They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know

The birdsong from the radio,

It’s not their fault they often go

To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars

In various bogus-Tudor bars

And daren’t look up and see the stars

But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care

Their wives frizz out peroxide hair

And dry it in synthetic air

And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough

To get it ready for the plough.

The cabbages are coming now;

The earth exhales.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 11 months ago
[–] [email protected] 20 points 11 months ago

I was curious about what Breezewood looked like today and after taking a short drive down the street in google maps, I think half these signs are either gone or just decrepit now. It looks like the rest of the bombed out aesthetic post 2008 financial crash you see in a bunch of places in the US.

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