That person is an eccentric red scare loon, the only thing they talk about is how anyone left of center is a commie. They appear to have no other thought in their mind.

I don’t think you’re an idiot i think you’re likely distracted. The world is trying to sell you something. Buy this amendment, buy this tool, buy my guide, use this 1 neat trick, use my hack no one has thought of. People have been planting food for at least 10000 years. When people thought the sun was literally god and knew nothing of soil microbiology or npk. Stop over thinking it and stick to the basics. After addressing the basics search for simple solutions to problems that come your way. Most plants grow themselves, they are biologically adapted to survival.

Start by growing easy things that need no maintenance and are native to your area or grow in your climate. If you’re in a northern climate you can literally stick raspberry plants and/or wild or ever bearing strawberries in the ground and 2-3 years later you will have a full berry patch with 0 effort, they spread and grow themselves. Throw food bearing bushes and trees in the ground and water and feed them here and there the first season and they will pay dividends for the next 20-30 years. Plant 3 chive plants and you will never need to buy them in spring/summer again. They come back every year without any maintenance. There are so many things you can just plant and let exist, start there.

Building up expertise… you mean like watch any of the thousands of accessible YouTube videos that say to do exactly this. I’m an amateur in the garden, watching a video to solve a simple problem being called expertise feels like you’re giving it more weight than it needs. We have much of the knowledge of human history at our fingertips, no expertise needed.

I wasn’t claiming hand terracing a hill was easy, the only thing I claimed was easy was growing food. Terracing a hill isn’t a requirement for everyone. Shit, its not even for me, its just where I wanted the garden. You know what is hard? My fucking job, that I work at to make money to buy food. I’d much rather keep expanding my garden bit by bit and grow something that is comparatively free, than spend more of my life working for someone else. A fair amount of the crops I’m adding are take care of themselves crops. Raspberries, blueberries, hazelnuts, skirret, chives, rhubarb, Egyptian walking onions, mint, thyme, parsley, etc. all basically take care of themselves once in the ground.

Everything I do to create comparatively easier parallel systems to separate myself out of a broken evil system makes my life much easier. It relieves mental stress and brings me peace. In my opinion people equate doing less in the short term as easy, but life isn’t that simple. Gardening is the easiest route in my life. I am very lazy. Its more work and mental load to give my time to someone else in a broken system. Then to also spend my time in a grocery aisle wondering just how poor quality the food I’m eating is. Gardening is a relief to the pressure of a dying society, its the easiest route in a shit world.

While a bad example, because some things were initially potentially difficult for your average person, I just switched everything to Linux, graphene os, and a home server with used parts on hand. It ultimately reduced mental load and made my life easier. Sometimes the easiest route in life is adding a little work on the front end. Using Linux and graphene greatly reduced my mental load. I rarely have to consider what I’m interacting with because I eliminated 80% of the programs that were spying on me and selling my data. I also spend less time trying to fix something Microsoft broke.

My initial point was admittedly clumsy and flippant. But I really think people obfuscate how difficult gardening is. Life is difficult, growing things, is comparatively easy. Plants grow with very little interaction from you. Shit, they grow in the wild without your help. Your input is best spent protecting the plant and letting it do it’s thing outside of a drought. To me that’s easy, something anyone with access to land and an able body can do. Only 1%-3% of people can do my technical job, but 100% of able bodied people with land can garden.

I’ve had issues with bugs which has mostly been solved by interplanting everything. Every tomato, pepper, and basil plant is in different parts of the garden with marigolds and other companion plants around. Bugs like monocrops, they tend to have lower pressure when you mix things up. Bugs still get a few things, but they are a lot less focused than when I grew things in large monocrop beds. The bad back makes it hard though, planting can be hard on your back.

Certainly some of the things you listed can present challenges, but I really think our society mythologises planting and farming and that was really my point, which I made poorly because I was being too flippant.

We act like producing food is an 80 hour a week job for only the smartest green thumbs when it doesn’t even take a fraction of that time and takes an accessible amount of skill.

Provided you’re privileged enough to have access to 1/4 - 1/2 acre of sunny land, you could grow a decent portion of your food for under 10 hrs a week. I know people who do.

Certainly expanding to that size takes some time prepping new beds, but maintaining existing beds and growing food in them is really not that much work. I maintain about 1500 sq/ft of food garden right now and outside of 5-15 hours of early spring prep I spend 1-2 hours a week in the garden through most of the actual growing season, and that’s probably an over estimation. Each season I expand a manageable amount, and that’s really the most time consuming because I am hand terracing a hill, 1 row each year. Certainly there is work, but acting like its super hard is just silly. I spend most of my time doing anything but gardening.

I grow food, provided you have land and time, its so fucking easy. You put compost down, add seeds, add mulch, water deeply when the ground dries out. I use a hose timer so I can turn it on and walk away. None of this is rocket science, people way over think their gardens, plants are resilient.

If that’s what i think it is, you get a whole head, its still too early. They start out growing every which way and later a head forms in the middle.

Its not that its hard, but it takes land and time, which is a privilege. Growing food is actually incredibly easy. But not everyone can access land, and you still need 30-60 days for lettuce to grow to maturity. If I need lettuce today, how does putting seeds in the ground help for the next month.

You’re whole argument is a series of straw mans and doesn’t actually address what I said. You can literally go in and vote for no one or only one down ballot candidate you believe in and that would be far more productive than not voting. I could be the most left wing candidate that ever lived and courting non voters would still be a waste in most elections. How are you going to convince me that courting someone that has voted in last 4 elections is less important than courting someone who skipped the last 4? If you don’t vote, you’ve announced to the world you don’t care and the world responded as expected.

And exit polling doesn’t exist for non voters if they don’t vote… Who are these mythical people who never vote but we have mountains of data on. The primary way parties get data is through voter rolls and party affiliation that they cross reference with purchased metadata. If your not voting they have a choice between targeting reliable voters they know support them and complete mysteries that never vote, be real here.

Not voting only tells candidates that you’re not a reliable voter, so they can ignore you. They don’t see your non-vote as a protest vote, because failing to vote means you don’t exist to them. If you want to exist to politicians you have to vote. Also, there are nearly always down ballot candidates that are progressive that get ignored because morons act like the top of the ticket is the only reason to leave their moms basement.

Think of it from the perspective of a candidate, they have endless data showing them that no matter how hard they try they won’t meet your moral purity test, so they court reliable voters with their messaging and resources.