So, I literally just now learned about the Primus album you just named, but I've been reading the book The Rainbow Goblins that provided the cover art for the album to my kid for a few months now, and let me tell you, it is a weird fuckin' kid's book.
It's crazy how interacting with a lot of people of various different backgrounds has a tendency to push people to the left, whereas having a half-mile long driveway makes it easy to stay conservative.
Also meaningfully addressing the underlying causes of an enormous amount of anxiety. Therapy is good for and should be easily available to everyone, but you can't therapy your way out of rampant climate change, wealth inequality, and governmental rot.
Even if, just for the sake of argument, you assume that these people are living in tents on the streets just because they don't feel like finding housing, which is already an absolutely massive assumption that I don't for one instant actually describes reality, there's still this...
If you believe that laws forbidding gambling, sale of liquor, sale of contraceptives, requiring definite closing hours, enforcing the Sabbath, or any such, are necessary to the welfare of your community, that is your right and I do not ask you to surrender your beliefs or give up your efforts to put over such laws. But remember that such laws are, at most, a preliminary step in doing away with the evils they indict. Moral evils can never be solved by anything as easy as passing laws alone. If you aid in passing such laws without bothering to follow through by digging in to the involved questions of sociology, economics, and psychology which underlie the causes of the evils you are gunning for, you will not only fail to correct the evils you sought to prohibit but will create a dozen new evils as well.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
You can't just make a problem go away by making it illegal, you've got to address the root causes.
I just went to a Nerf blaster tournament, and it seemed very queer-friendly, which is interesting and frankly encouraging considering how gun-adjacent the whole hobby is.
Jesus replied, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, for this was not revealed to you by flesh and blood, but by my Father in heaven. And I tell you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overcome it.
Christians: Got it.
Stephanie: I used to be called Mark, but now I'm Stephanie.
Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run . . . but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant. . . .
History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.
My central memory of that time seems to hang on one or five or maybe forty nights—or very early mornings—when I left the Fillmore half-crazy and, instead of going home, aimed the big 650 Lightning across the Bay Bridge at a hundred miles an hour wearing L. L. Bean shorts and a Butte sheepherder's jacket . . . booming through the Treasure Island tunnel at the lights of Oakland and Berkeley and Richmond, not quite sure which turn-off to take when I got to the other end (always stalling at the toll-gate, too twisted to find neutral while I fumbled for change) . . . but being absolutely certain that no matter which way I went I would come to a place where people were just as high and wild as I was: No doubt at all about that. . . .
There was madness in any direction, at any hour. If not across the Bay, then up the Golden Gate or down 101 to Los Altos or La Honda. . . . You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning. . . .
And that, I think, was the handle—that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn’t need that. Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting—on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. . . .
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream
So, I literally just now learned about the Primus album you just named, but I've been reading the book The Rainbow Goblins that provided the cover art for the album to my kid for a few months now, and let me tell you, it is a weird fuckin' kid's book.