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My one resolve, as I enter my greying, is to never become one of those dipshits.
The kids are alright, a little straight edge for my tastes but they’re alright.
pronouns: she/her is fine.
I am a conniving rat with plans of an international uprising against tyranny! I keep getting distracted by tasty food, gardening, gadgets, games, and books though.
Inside me are two wolves, I desperately need surgery.
My one resolve, as I enter my greying, is to never become one of those dipshits.
The kids are alright, a little straight edge for my tastes but they’re alright.
Everyone is getting stupider except you right? Like you’re not one of the dumbed down lazy people are you? or your loved ones?
People have said this shit since we have written records.The whole idea of fallen man is the foundation of the Abrahamic religions, probably others I don’t know of too.
People are doing alright, actually go talk to some. Yeah yeah a lot aren’t crazy educated but even the most educated intellectual titans of our age are uneducated in the overwhelming majority of things.
We do alright, there are many problems but they’re not because people are getting less intelligent. We are no smarter or stupider than the first humans, or at least we have no reason to believe otherwise. We have better access to information and we’re also facing some very large problems, but so did bronze age people.
Read the epic of Gilgamesh, it’ll chill you out some.
Smoking: easy way to quit smoking plus weed during the worst withdrawal to avoid snapping at everyone
Weed (earlier lmao, I still use sometimes but less than a gram a year really): having other things to do that require concentration and memory I enjoy. Weed is easy as it’s mostly habitual. The sleeplessness is the worst and it’s only a couple of days
Opiates: Exercise, avoiding boredom (v hard! video games, gardening, easy books, podcasts etc), lots of walking those restless nights, preparing easy food for the worst few days, counting days to know it was going to end. Be careful after surgery kids that shit sucks to come off.
hey man, we exported the fascist cooker that got their fascist cookers into power.
It’s an ouroboros! yaaaaaaaaaaay
I understand, today my own nation votes to slap down a hand outstretched in peace and warmth. In my own state police deploy anti terror powers to crack down on anyone attending a rally against Israeli militancy.
But if we give up nothing will improve, and everything good we have started small and grew into unstoppable movements.
Larger scale action takes smaller scale first
The Israeli government is able to pursue its horrible policies because of a lack of support for palastinian people.
Preventing protest in powerful nations stops public opinion changing. Public opinion allows the political establishment to continue to avoid historical responsibility.
If western nations drop support of Israel and start using sanctions etc it would be much harder to destroy Gaza.
This ban will allow the Israeli state to continue murdering an entire people unchecked
I don’t think that’s likely, we are apes not angels.
Sometimes we have conflicts, some are probably resolvable, some represent fundamentally opposed interests.
We can try to make society different, so there are fewer situations that lead to irresolvable conflicts. That project will never end.
Whether this gives you hope or grief is largely up to you.
Just don’t do what I did. You start with some basic mix right? good old 20/80/trace and you’re happy. But you wonder, who doesn’t wonder, so you try some different stuff right? I mean it’s there, can’t hurt to know cannit?
Maybe you try a little high/low humidity. you think hehe this feels a bit funny. Then it’s just a small step to puffing clouds at high altitude right? next think you know you’re chasing that forever. It’s strange and weird but then breathing down on the ground feels so exhilarating. Nothing can stop the road you’re on now.
You’ll be trying diving mixes, pure oxxy, vox mods with helium and shit. You’re sleeping among empty gas tanks. It’s no life man, no life at all.
Make better choices, it’s too late for me.
A lot of the Aussies you’ll chat to on the internet don’t realise how recent there was heavy segregation even among people broadly considered white now.
If you look at the last names of powerful people even now you’ll find that while they’re general all white dudes Irish last names are underrepresented, despite being around as long as English ones. A lot of migrants from Greece/Italy/Poland etc were heavily sidelined too.
Lets not even get into treatment of native peoples and non white migrants cause we’ll fucking be here all day.
This country is definitely heavily divided by class, last oecd report I read found 4 generation median time for bottom quartile income to next quartile up. That’s bonkers.
Everything is feedback cycles. Yes there’s homegrown bullshit but it’s naive to ignore how that is encouraged by for example the usa exporting neoliberalism and encouraging/bullying other countries to deregulate their own markets (like media ownership that lets people like Murdoch rise) for favourable political treatment.
It’s naive to ignore that when usa media, usa products, usa megacorps all arrive somewhere that they wont swing the culture.
The usa has almost certainly interfered in our elections ffs.
Being a country the usa has military interest in is incredible corrosive. It’s not just Australia where this has happened.
we elected a socialist in the 70s. It ended in a constitutional crisis and his successor was groomed by the CIA. rhymes with certain things no?
we had a publicly owned transport system, telephony, healthcare system, a thriving public service. Then we started getting leaned on.
We had a collectivist culture, government funding for our own media with our own values, then we started getting leaned on.
It goes on.
Even our slang is being replaced, people are pronouncing things your way, the media of the usa is replacing everything and that’s intentional government policy.
While it is true that insane propaganda is off the charts, for example in my own country Australia we’re chaining ourselves to the fading star of the usa and the UK militarily despite having:
all while the usa government tries it’s hardest to undermine our economic policy, erase our culture, and distort our politics towards their own demended lines.
There is zero evidence the chinese government does not want to do the same. They have interfered in our media, our education systems, there has been stupid petty trade squabbles with both “sides” using us for their own ends.
When chinese diplomats speak to our media, even in excruciatingly fair interviews, the pattern is the same slimey deny deny deny and legal quibble that usa diplomats engage in. Their media is insanely critical of Australian life too.
There are no good guys in this power struggle and looking for one is childish thinking.
Even this article refuses to address the notion that the chinese government has ever conducted itself in a condemnable manner.
agree with all of these, although sadly liquid smoke is probably not a healthy thing to have a lot of.
That said I eat onions all the time and they make me ill. Everyone makes their own judgement on the blandness for longevity trade
Find a sense engaging ritual and do it regularly.
For me it was having elaborate spice teas or herbal teas. I’d mix up batches and keep it in the office, when I needed some sanity taking the time to just focus on a damn good cup of tea helped me relax some.
A treat you enjoy, a stretching routine whatever you can do that is highly engaging would be a good choice. Force work out of your head even for 5 minutes. We aren’t meant to work like a steam engine.
Thanks, that’s a lot to think about. We currently use an oled computer monitor as a TV (hooked up to a pi) and it’s beautiful but there are limits on screen size and it’s crazy expensive (you’re paying for stupid fast refresh rates and the Gamer™ markup)
our house is very bright during the day, lots of glass in sunny Australia, so it’s probably not a great candidate for a projector generally but it does have me thinking about one in the bedroom for late night movies. Probably a lot cheaper and neater than another absurd monitor.
How dark do rooms need to be for them to work? Are there issues with shared spaces where someone might want a well lit workspace?
It sounds like you are basing how fine it is to hurt someone for pleasure (and that is all it is at this point) on how similar they look to you rather than any principled understanding of behaviour and neurology.
This is called speciesism and is just another manifestation of the cognitive failures that lead to most evil in the world.
It is absurd to equate grass releasing hormones that cause the production of bitter compounds with electrocuting a chicken. That is like saying steel feels pain because because it emits sparks when ground or that an amputated foot feels pain because nerves send signals for a while. Pain requires perception, we obviously have no test for an inner listener but we can compare behaviour.
This is after all why you believe I am a real person and not a sophisticated automaton.
The only real behavioural difference we can find between us and birds for example is possibly language. Parrots and corvids there is some evidence they can do language, rather than communication. Even so it’s absurd to use this as a line for acceptable suffering as you would essentially be arguing that human infants and humans with certain cognitive differences were acceptable to kill for meat.
The problem with isms is that you can’t draw meaningful lines around the world if you start from a conclusion and work backwards (in this case, animals other than humans are sometimes ok to eat). The moment you start trying to defend it you are forced to confront that the position isn’t reasonable but rationalised.
I suspect you know this, because you feel some degree of guilt and are throwing out statements like “plants feel pain” which have the objective of winning an argument rather than finding truth.
Drugs are great, you take them too most like (caffeine, ethanol, theanine etc). It’s the power that fucked that shit head up.
Loads of people take ketamine and just like appreciate jazz or some other banal shit.