Philosophically, I think the pursuit of truth and the exercise of compassion are worthwhile endeavors.

But when that’s too abstract, I remind myself that I have people who rely on me and benefit from my presence in their life. I work to make the world around me better than it was before, so that others can immediately, and in the future, have better lives.

Lay down for a minute, close your eyes and just let your brain babble about shit for a bit. Then, pick one at random and try to start it. Maybe try to find something engaging to think about, because then you’ll be more comfortable with doing stuff.

There’s this app on F-Droid called WikWok. It basically presents you with random wikipedia articles in a kind of feed like with TikTok.

If I were you, I’d download it and scroll until something that you find interesting appears and then read a bit of it. Then ask yourself a question.

This usually gets me up and pacing, and once I’m pacing I want to fidget with stuff so I go do chores.

May not work for you, but that’s what I got.

I’m glad someone is fighting the good fight. It’s becoming more and more obvious that the prevalence of these tool in academic circles may cause more harm than good.

It’s a great dream, leaving. I’m not rich enough to make that happen, though. Maybe once things get worse, I can become a refugee- but, it’s more likely that I’ll cling to life here until it’s impossible to continue.

Oh God, I checked and I’m so glad the trans ban didn’t make it to the final budget. I was so worried about that.

That means, at least, it’s going to be a few more years before they try to ban trans people from existing.

There’s a conversation that could be had about how there are no truly public platforms on the web. Ultimately, everywhere you can speak is owned by someone, and any community you build exists at their mercy. This can exert a lot of pressure on a community’s standards and beliefs, and when I started using the internet, abusing this was a major faux pas.

However, that conversation requires a lot of nuance and patience. You are kind of transparently posting this in response to a moderator in another community removing your posts. If you’d like to complain about that, there’s actually a community specifically for that.

By the by, free speech complaints have become strongly associated with certain political movements as dog whistles. You might want to look into that and make sure you want to present that image.

How long have you been using the internet?

I used to drink an inhuman amount of caffeine. It made starting my meds kind of hard, because the caffeine started actually affecting me like it’s supposed to.

So I was suddenly very jittery and nervous. For a bit I thought it was the medication, but then one day when I was making myself a cup of black tea I stopped and went, “…hey, wait, caffeine?”

Weening myself off of it was brutal. I started trying to drink one tea a day, then switched to green tea and very gradually decreased the amount of caffeine. I still occasionally get cravings, but luckily I can trick my body by drinking decaf tea.

It made me so fucking cranky, by the way, caffin withdrawal sucks.

For real, for real.

Fancy savings account for retirement that’s stored in stocks so it can explode at any point. Basic perquisite to ever retire in the US. Many people don’t have them.

Yeah, see, I am on your side but the focus on “destroying books is bad,” is kind of irrelevant to the actual harm being done.

It’s that they’re devouring the contents of people’s brains for the ability to replace them that’s concerning. If they chose to do this in a completely different way that preserved the books, I would not say it changes the moral valence of their actions.

By centering the argument on the destruction of the books, it shifts it away from the actual concern.

Your empathy is in a good place, but the problem isn’t how humans are broken, it’s what is breaking them.

Western society* is built in a really dumb and alienating way. Humans are reduced to a labor commodity, places where people can mingle socially are being commercialized out of existence, the internet has evolved into a machine that actively profits from outrage and alienation, our governmental institutions are primarily driven by forces no regular person has any power over and we can’t even feel pride in our work because it’s profitable to convince us that we are replaceable and disposable.

Where’s the social incentive to connect to other people? The powers that be benefit from a disorganized and isolated population, so they will do nothing to change that. Market incentives mean that media which focused on things that provoke fear, rage and anxiety are more profitable than ones that promote community, happiness or hope.

It’s permeated so deeply into our culture that some older kids movies seem completely insane now. Like, think about ET and consider how wild it would be nowadays for you to just let your children vanish for hours doing whatever and wandering around wherever.

The fear and anxiety determines our actions, and there are multiple incentives on a macro-social level for that to continue.

Hell, I have watched this happen in real time during my 10+ year time on the web, where the communities of excited weirdos sharing their thoughts and feelings have been so thoroughly dominated by this that it is hard to engage with any social media without someone shoving a headline into your face that is intended to upset you.

On Tumblr, for example, the trend was so strong that the idea that you weren’t constantly upset was a sign of being a bad person. You know, on the Superwholock site? Yeah, the one that wanted to fuck the Onceler.

If you want to reverse this trend, it’s going to require changing how our political, economic and media environments act by changing their incentives. Otherwise, any change will be superficial and fail to produce meaningful results.

It’s pretty depressing, but that’s the situation as I see it.

*I’m not qualified to comment on other cultural spheres.

This reminds me of when I shadowed a librarian in high school and they talked to me about how people got really upset with them throwing away books that had multiple reprintings and were in awful condition.

Because people as a whole lack the capacity for nuance, I guess.

Bad focus on the news article.

Preach. I’m so bad at selling myself!

I just want a job with a living wage now, and it’s agonizingly, dehumanizingly hard to look online. Especially if you have the extreme rejection sensitivity aspect of ADHD.

I wholeheartedly agree.

…so what about the minorities in those red states who are stuck there because of their financial or familial situations, and who lack the power to influence politics?

Wouldn’t work out. World’s too complicated for simple answers like that.

Leaving, even if it would produce a viable nation, would involve leaving a lot of people in the lurch. There’s people in conservative states who need the counter balance of blue states to slow down their government’s trend to self destruction and fascism.

Even though it’s increasingly frustrating with how feeble that resistance is, it does keep things like banning gay marriage in the “difficult to pass” territory and not the “a few compromises” one.

Yeah, typo on my part 😅 Pasdechance has it right, I meant news company.

Europol’s Deputy Executive Director of Operations Jean-Philippe Lecouffe said in a statement. “By dismantling its infrastructure and arresting its key players, we are sending a clear message: there is no safe haven for those who profit from harm.”

(Looks at the camera)

Just as an aside, the person who owns this new company donated millions to the Trump campaign.