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Cake day: August 18th, 2024

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  • Everyone knows “The Road Not Taken”, or at least they think they do. That last line gets dragged out like it means something deep: “I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.” People slap it on posters and act like it says something profound about carving your own path.

    But if you actually read the thing, Frost tells you both roads were basically the same. “Worn really about the same.” “Both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.” There wasn’t a real difference. The choice wasn’t bold or rebellious. It was random.

    The speaker even admits he is going to lie about it later: “I shall be telling this with a sigh…” That line doesn’t sound triumphant. It sounds like someone trying to justify a decision they barely understood at the time.

    I teach this poem every year, mostly as a way to get students to slow down and actually read what’s on the page. It’s one of the best examples I know of how easy it is to bring your own ideas into a text and miss what the author’s really doing. Frost wasn’t handing out life advice. He was pulling back the curtain on how people fool themselves.








  • You’re not wrong about the dishonesty and hypocrisy—it has poisoned the well across the board. A politician without red lines or real principles isn’t on the left, no matter what they call themselves.

    But where we differ is in how we respond to that reality. As much as I agree with your point, I have to take a more pragmatic view. Not voting against Trump is part of how we got Trump. Sitting it out or refusing to engage just hands power to the worst option.

    I hate the choices as much as anyone. It’s a shit sandwich. But I’d rather work with what I’ve got and try to make it suck less than give the whole table over to outright fascism.

    I’ll keep calling out the hypocrisy, and I’ll keep pushing from the left—but I won’t step aside and let something far worse win by default. Idealism has to live in the real world, or it ends up serving the very thing it claims to resist.









  • All this is very confusing to me. I had to look up what tankies are and if these giuys are tankies then they can go fuck themselves. I came here from reddit and now I am thinking I might have made a mistake. I don’t know enough aboput this federated stuff to understand it. I have no idea how to block .ml nor do I know who these people are who run it. I do know that I had a very close Ukrainian friend as a child and although he is dead now I still see the Ukrainian people are brothers and sisters. I am not sure I want to give any of my money to an intance that actively shits out fucking ork propaganda. I need some educating here.