It's all a part of Azathoth's dream anyway, long may they slumber.

Those kids were just figments, but then so are we.

In Julius Caesar a clock strikes three, and while they had hours (a fraction of the daytime, not a standard unit) they didn't have mechanical clocks.

But then while we know what happened to Julius Caesar based on historical accounts, even chronicles were politicized, which is why we don't know of Julia the Elder boffed half of Rome or was just the victim of slander. (Dramatists prefer she did while academics assume she was virtuous). So we know some of the details of the mass assassination of Julius Caesar but we only know some of the general details, which allows a lot of latitude in period recreations.

Jesus existed according to academics (based on third party accounts) but he might have just been an anti-establishment activist or a failed apocalyptic prophet. Not only did Jerusalem have those by the dozen but so did most satellites from which Rome demanded tribute. The miracles and matching Jesus up to fit the prophesies came later. Also Pontius Pilate loved crucifixion and had execution teams on standby where it was considered elsewhere in Rome a dire sentence for the worst of offenders. Pilate was the Roman equivalent of a hanging judge, so it was super-easy for a malcontent in Jerusalem to end up on the cross.

Expect counter protests and unfriendly police departments. If they show up, bricks may be appropriate after all.

First aid, water bottles and other protest support kitch will better serve to help and will be needed by attendees regardless.

Pride is a season around a day, much the way that the Thanksgiving / Christmas is a season around specific days. A lot of families have to gather from far reaches together for Thanksgiving feast and Christmas Day, hence there's preparation and travel as well as food prep and gift gathering. Halloween is similar for those who take it seriously. It's a day for the kids but it's a month (or more!) for those who want to represent.

Pride ~~wasn't~~ isn't allowed everywhere, and in the beginning it only happened in those municipalities that had enough of a gay village (an LGBT+ community) to be a voting bloc. As a result there was a lot of travel arrangements from self-discovered people across the country. There were a lot of phone calls to friends to friends from last year if they'll still provide a place to crash.

The pride parade day is typically the weekend of June 28th (the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall uprising). But sometimes the parade has to accommodate other circumstances in the city, so check with the organizers to get time and date confirmed.

A lot of those attending like to prepare their attire and accessories to look good. And if there are counter-protests or unfriendly law enforcement (more common than we like) then protest gear (first aid kits, bear spray, anonymizing bloc) may also be appropriate and add to the preparation schedule.

It's a day and a half the way we Americans drive which is to run on coffee and fast food and burn above the speed limit for fourteen hours a day.

I am (or was, now I'm having doubts) of the belief that European motorists were more inclined to take their time, see some sights and not exhaust themselves in the transit. That may have been a late-20th century thing.

I don't think naturalism negates our collective community, but it does mean it is up to us to navigate an instinct for small tribes. Once we took up advanced agriculture and stopped migrating, we built large societies. And since then we have been contending with subversives who favor their own smaller sects over the good of the community, and they are very good at subverting larger systems for their personal gain.

Most theistic paradigms insist that there are higher powers to assist us when we confront existential threats (such as the climate crisis). Naturalism is one of the paradigms (not the only one) that confronts that there are no safety nets or training wheels. The human species can die out without the assurance of self-sustaining off-world colonies, and there are no higher powers to care or even notice. (Again, not to say they don't exist, but we've looked hard and been unable to detect them.)

Human society may, possibly in the face of the Trump regime, finally take class consciousness and community-focused governance seriously on a large scale. (There have been smaller scale examples.)

However, this isn't the first time we've thought about it and been subverted by established political power. Rather historically, often just after a bout of tyranny, societal collapse and its consequential horrors, we decide as firmly as we can that this time we're going to do it right! and then it gets diluted and subverted within even thirty years.

So to address the matter of uniting our collective community in a global cooperative effort: It's going to take a sociological miracle. We need to discover some new method, invent some new technology that enables all of us, even Trump, Musk, Vought and Thiel to recognize that every one of our fellow 343 million Americans (or 8 billion plus fellow humans) is, as Jesus put it, our neighbor who we should regard equally, that the worst renegade and the most wretched transient deserve the same benefits and treatment as themselves. And then this new thing needs to be resistant to efforts to subvert it.

(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal imagined such a gimmick, though I can't locate the specific comic. In it a point system is invented, and it's noted that people are nice for the points rather than for a sincere interest in community, but the system works, so it doesn't matter much.)

And we need to do it soon. We're running out of water, and the global average temperature is now at levels where experts warned us could prove a challenge to responders even at the national scale as hurricanes and wildfires rampage across the planet. The unlucky ones will survive until the global famine.

Naturalistic philosophy doesn't say we can't navigate our way to a community-driven society that acknowledges the least of us deserve a comfy life and we should mind the environment, rather, it only acknowledges that if we don't we risk human extinction, and if we die out, there's nothing watching out for us. The greatest cosmic horrir: throughout the universe not even a fraction of a fuck will be given as all of our culture, all of our ideas and works will be reduced to another geological layer on a speck orbiting a spark.

And a lot of people are not prepared to confront this.

In contrast, we far leftists want free stuff.

Basically, we want to be able to tune the production process of essentials so that potatoes 🥔 and drinking water 🥤are dispensed the way we do napkins, and people can take all they need. And with time we expand the free stuff dispensed to smart phones and rocket fuel and ice cream sundaes 🍨

The stuff isn't absolutely free, and even these days napkin dispensers are adorned with save the trees signs but the price to the end-user is negligible. Sometimes we have to watch our systems for abuse, but then sometimes someone just needs a lot of potatoes. 🥔

Also tool libraries and eventually motor pools that can serve communities who sometimes need gear, but not always. It's kinda creepy how big automotive has us buying two cars for every home and we can't spare government funds for (eventually free) robust public rail.

The 2020 lockdown showed us that people are not turned into couch potatoes 🥔 by benefits and furloughs. (They do couch potato after burnout or due to depression) rather they take up hobbies, many of which become lucrative or are useful to the community. (Community projects were harder because we were hiding in our homes) This led to the Great Resignation during which companies had to offer higher than minimum wage for their bottom-rung jobs.

We've also seen government benefits programs facilitate great movements in art. The whole British Rock-&-Roll boom of the 1960s followed the post-war restoration programs to get everyone who lost everything fed again and back into homes. Then someone threw in an electric guitar.

So it's not bad to want free stuff. It's just assumed that you can't have free stuff if someone else can make a profit by charging, ergo paid toilets and office bathroom tissue pools.

One of the factors is that the US is surprisingly huge. It takes EU tourists by surprise that a quick jaunt from NYC to visit their friend in Chicago is several days by road (unless you drive like an American roadtripper for fourteen hours a day) moreover, there's just huge tracks of land featuring not-too-exciting vistas (unless you plan your road trip to feature pretty routes, in which case multiply the distance by 1.3), so for the short while that airlines were regulated and we weren't worried (yet) about the air-travel carbon footprint (Huge. Enormous. Colossal.) it made sense to fly everywhere in the US.

Now that it's insanely expensive and inconvenient to fly, and we shouldn't be doing it, it's time for the US to build HSR for realsies, if the automotive / fossil fuel industrial complex will let us.

If you're close enough, you can walk.

ETA I'd expect there are fast rails from Berlin to Paris, and if not, why not?

Yeah, I warn those who are challenging their own faith that naturalism isn't for everyone. For me it was a stark process to come to terms that I'm thinking meat, and my species is looking at some imminent great filters even before we are able to create a dependent colony on our own moon, so mostly harmless is going to be more of a footnote than our society deserves.

As someone who had an early aspiration to add something significant to the collective community that it could take with it into the future, this proved to be a bit of a let-down.

I'm getting a paywall or adblock block or something. Anyone have a less problematic link to the article?

The climate crisis has a good chance of completing the job. And then there's a lot of not-quite-worst-case scenarios where a tiny number of humans are able to survive for the tens of thousands of years it'll take for the earth to repair itself. Everything we know about humanity will be lost and replaced by an entirely different culture.