Der Feuervogel aufersteht.

So I'm going to DC this weekend, and I'm staying with my sister Friday and Saturday nights. We're trying to work out what to do for dinner Saturday. (Friday we're going to Agora for Turkish food, which sounds awesome.)

I suggest the lazy-ass pasta bake and throwing in some Quorn (chunks or grounds) for extra filling properties. She says "BF is a real meat-eater..." and I'm just like "if he's that inflexible, I'm happy to go out again."

So she replies with this "you threw a tantrum when you were younger and couldn't eat in restaurants, and we prefer to eat real meat. You don't like meat, I'm just trying to cover all our preferences."

First off, our grandmother decided it was a good idea to take a vegetarian to Steak and Ale. The only options that weren't meat were starches (baked potatoes) and sides (spinach, etc). Not exactly what I call dinner! Second off, it's not a "preference." If I eat meat, I have gastrointestinal distress. I found this out by accidentally eating ground beef a few years ago. (I was really hungry and brain-fried from an all-day tai chi workshop.)

Third off, is it that fucking hard to not eat meat just ONE fucking time? Seriously?

Fucking asshole meat-eaters. This is why I hate you.

I'm aware of various reasons, like automakers in the early 20th century actively eliminating railways in the name of profit (thank you, capitalism), and preferential funding for highways over trains, as well as anti-state arguments that trains are too heavily subsidized by the government and Amtrak should be forced to compete on the open market (while conveniently ignoring the fact that gas taxes aren't the entire source of highway funds, or the massive subsidies on gas and cars (by tax breaks to carmakers)).

Notable conservative pundit George Will is against trains because they take away our individualism and are the first step to socialism. (I wish I were making that up.) Factor in a bit of projection (ie, liberals say they want trains because X, but really COMMUNISM) and a bit of hypocrisy, and you have the face of modern movement conservatism. (Note: if you don't know the difference between being conservative and movement conservatism, spend a few minutes with google before yelling at me.)

A nice piece on CNN fact checks a lot of these myths, and an operations engineer asks why so riled about rail?

Seriously, why do Americans flip their collective shit at the thought of TRAINS? Trains are awesome. Amtrak kind of sucks, but that's not completely Amtrak's fault. It's in large part due to the inevitable shit-flipping from Americans at the thought of building train tracks and having the government fund something that will let people get from point A to point B without putting 500,000 one-person-SUVs on I-95.

I'm going to Boston this July, and because I object to security theater, the war on liquids, and the option of submitting myself to probably-unsafe radiation levels/naked scanner or a pat-down that borders on sexual assault, I'm taking the train. It's a good 800 miles by train between here and there, and I can go direct, leaving here at 10 am and arriving in Boston at 8 am, or I can take the train to DC and stay with my sister overnight, then catch one of the regular morning trains to Boston, and repeat the process in reverse. Not a big deal, sort of inconvenient, but I'm the person who took an overnight train from Berlin to Vienna because that only cost 49 Euro and about 12 hours. (There were fancier trains with actual sleeping compartments (EuroCityNight), but they were a lot more expensive.)

Ben's going to Atlanta in a couple weeks for a concert, and he wondered if it would be possible to take the train down. Short answer: no. The train to Atlanta leaves from Greensboro at 12:30 am (midnight) and gets to ATL at 8:30 am. Annoying, sure, and I don't know many people who'd want to be in GSO at midnight because it's kind of dangerous. If he went to GSO by train, he'd have to leave Durham around 5:30 and wait in GSO for 6 hours. WONDERFUL, yes. Coming back, he'd leave ATL at 8:30 pm and get to GSO at 4 am. Which is also extremely convenient.

Now, if you were going from NYC to New Orleans, you'd have great departure and arrival times, and that 1400 miles only takes about 30 hours, assuming you don't have to wait for CTX trains to pass, since CTX owns the tracks and Amtrak only leases them, so CTX has the right of way.

Here are two people who would rather take the train, rather than be yet another one-occupant vehicle on the road, but American individual-über-alles culture and its worship of cars with the policy decisions that go along with this car-idolatry has made it inconvenient to impossible.

It's not possible to take the train from Raleigh, NC, to Memphis, TN. It's marginally possible to take the train from Raleigh to Detroit (which I looked into because there's a Gold Cup match between the US men and...Canada maybe? this summer).

I make no secret of my far-leftward (at least in the US) leanings, nor of my distaste for privileged assholes living in a thought experiment which, unleashed upon the world, would result in the deaths of millions, and corporate feudalism.

It is an immoral "philosophy" because their dogma, applied to the existing society, would result in "unintended" consequences, and for people whose battle cry is "laws have unintended consequences, therefore laws are stupid and should be abolished," the hypocrisy is, well, not charming or funny, just typically appalling. Allowing GM to fail, for example, wouldn't "punish" just GM's board for their bad decisions, but the thousands of workers who would lose their jobs at GM factories, those workers' families, the various store owners and employees in the town where the GM employees, now laid off and spending less money, live and shop, and even further reaching consequences, such as the suppliers of parts for the now-closed factory, their employees, their employees' families, and the various store owners and employees in the towns where GM's suppliers live and work.

Ignoring the real-world consequences because they're inconvenient for your theory is not only immoral, but monstrous and disgusting.

Their naïvete is inextricable from the enormous socioeconomic privilege that Libertarians have. They pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps, attached to the finest hand-tooled leather boots their parents' money could buy.

A common Libertarian argument is that if people don't like the conditions at job X, people can negotiate better conditions, or they can leave and find a new job. They also apply this to their perfect, free-market "minarchist" society, where each city/state/corporatofeudal region has its own system of laws and rights, so for example in Libertarian Utopia America, San Francisco would be able to have its own set of LGBT-friendly laws, while Alabama could have its own set of racist, homophobic laws, and the Holy Invisible Hand of the Perfect Free Market would sort everything out, because people who want gay-friendly places to live and work could move to SFO, and bigots could move to Alabama.

(Sorry, non-bigoted Alabamans. I know there are some out there. Just your state came to mind because of the Christofascism evinced by an elected official recently, in which he said that only Christians are his brothers.)

In a perfect world, where packing up and moving 2000+ miles is inexpensive and risk-free, SURE. But people aren't robots without ties to places, like friends or family. There are a lot of reasons that moving is difficult, like the cost of hauling all your things, or even some of your things, 2000+ miles, wondering whether you'll make friends there, giving up free or low-cost child care if you're leaving your family behind.

Only someone who's never had to worry about making this month's rent could so blithely say, "Well, you can just move."

Only someone who's never had to worry about being fired for missing work to take their sick kid to the doctor could so blithely say In the USA, we have the freedom to negotiate whatever vacation we want. The idea that it’s generous to force employers to give holidays is just populism for suckers. I get 5 weeks holiday per year, because the free market works just fine. Some people have other interests.

Disgusting.

There are other reasons, like their privatization fetish and ludicrous belief that corporations are people, but other people have discussed those elsewhere.

Today, I checked 1450 prescriptions, and I stayed until 7:45 -- 45 minutes beyond my normal leaving time! My ankle started hurting suddenly, and my knees are swollen. I blame the incoming low pressure system. OK, also standing for 8.75 hours.

I also got a call from my agenty person, K, who says that W, the manager guy, wants to keep me even longer, on a 2-week-ly basis. WHAT THE FUCK. I thought they had a guy starting this month! Now he wants to keep me into April?

I can't keep doing this! I need to edit my novel, and I have a ton of party prep I'd planned on having next week available for. I also have a short story to write. Oh yeah, and NINE springkink prompts to write, starting the 16th. and maybe also spend some time with the boy I'm not-dating. Or whatever.

Irony: The money I'll make in these additional two - four weeks will cover tuition and room & board for Viable Paradise, but if I don't have some time off, there's no fucking way I'll be able to get my application materials together.

So I have to call K back tomorrow, and I'll need to work something out. Maybe fewer hours again. The 1-7 worked out fairly well, if frustrating at times. (though Mondays I'd go in earlier; Mondays are nucking futs.)

I'm going to go collapse now. In theory, I want to get up and work out tomorrow. I feel lazy.