Removed by mod

Are we so certain that it is not a toilet paper roll? :-P

Let’s see what is left to cover…

You guys have whole entire inches from the wall to spare?

Wait… you guys have bathrooms?!

Indeed, it might be neat to stop such things, wherever they occur.

More people die on average every week in American school shootings but… okay.

Nah - back then, that was a problem for tomorrow’s (now today’s) politicians to have to solve. So long as it worked to put Trump in power, and attempt to remain there, everything was going to be A-okay. And that’s my problem with that kind of thinking: it works, but it’s always only ever short-term for some reason.

Oh no, if only this entirely predictable outcome could have somehow been… predicted?

I guess we didn’t threaten enough doctors and nurses lives and families /s.

But the (clickbait) title got people to (click) talk about it so… it accomplished its publishers’ goal, nonetheless.

You are talking about user-level blocking, whereas iirc defederation is an instance-level blocking that also stops user comments too, as well as votes.

The “election” is perpetual. People will vote with their participation.

As it should always be.

Why is “Threats” in double-quotes? The fact that they are “threats” is not in question - these are not “alleged threats”?

I see that it comes from the article, but that only pushes back my question as to why the article does that. It also puts “hard right” and “all-out” (and “holy war” and “race war” and “dangerous” and “evil” and “demonic” etc.) in quotes too, which should not be, but those at least are all more discretionary, whereas putting “threats” in quotes like that calls into question their validity.

He can love his son and also democracy and justice too - i.e. allow his son to go to what will surely be like a resort vacation spa that they will call “prison” (not bc he’s special, just bc he’s rich).

I wonder if somebody shot the guy?

We all have our traumas. For instance my grandfather had a similar story - he would not entertain the notion of us having any relion besides Catholicism, though he himself had not attended church in decades. He saw too much how the sausage was made, and could not stomache it, though he still believed, ostensibly, except he did not, but again would not allow us to go our own way without comment. I realize that came from his pain, though have too much of my own to really be able to fully set foot into his shoes there. I realized from all that - and later from reading the irl backstory of CS Lewis, who walked away from his puritanical upbringing to become atheist - that a lot of people have a made-up “god”, and that quite frankly Jesus Himself not only “would be” but WAS fucking PISSED at that aspect of life. We all should be more atheistic - yes, this from the very words of Christ Himself!!! (hehe, my rather… “liberal” interpretation of them anyway:-P, e.g. “be ye either hot or cold, not just making up whatever the fuck you want and call it a day”)

I feel like there is a Truth to the universe - this is what makes e.g. planes fly in (or in Boeing’s case fall out of) the sky - and while we do not have to choose to live in Reality, preferring our fantasy dreamland adventures, it really is (probably) better to do so. So the real question is whether God exists or not, not whether we want him to. Ofc that proves a bit hard to answer, or to prove even if someone knew for certain. Like in The Matrix movie, if Neo himself introduced himself to you and you saw him fly, but did not record it on camera (or even if you did), how could you convey that? Similarly, how can smart people convey the complexities of mathematics, of physics, of philosophy, to people who literally cannot - as in do not have the capacity to uptake - understand even a fraction of wha t you speak of? How can people who KNOW convey that both the Left and the Right side of politics are both WRONG, having been bought out by corporate special interests (but that even so, one side is most definitely even more so in that regard lately…)? Ofc we cannot, and really, except the “hard sciences” one, how can we even be fully sure of what we DO happen to know? (and even there, physics is constantly over-turning old ideas - like the latest thought that there is no need for all that “dark matter” that the media has been throwing about for decades now, just poof, it’s all gone now!? ofc most things are merely supplanted by a higher-resolution version, like Newtonian is not gone just relegated to a subset of Einsteinian mathematical formulations of our understanding of the universe)

Another thing I use the Bible for btw is as a repository of the “wisdom of the ages”, as in even though I believe in a God, putting that aside and conjecturing at worst as if that were a false statement even, there is still some merit in its depictions of things. And I definitely looked through its verses regarding teaching… which convey that you just CAN’T force knowledge onto people, not b/c of stupidity but rather b/c of obstinancy. “You can lead a horse to water, but you cannot make it drink.” I still would have offered them the benefits of my knowledge & experience regardless, except it was heartbroken to think that they were being saddled with generational levels of debt, for a degree that they probably would not even use, b/c they lacked the emotional maturity level to handle life beyond the (post-No Child Left Behind era) high school level.

Regrets: I actually have very few of those in my life, b/c I realize that the past me did not know what the current me does, so how could I have done any differently, and furthermore why bother thinking along the lines as if I somehow could? That said, like CS Lewis (this being the main reason why I like him, b/c I so very much “get” his struggles), I often arrive at the correct conclusion from the most bass-ackwards route, which highly ironically may thereby end up making it potentially the wrong thing, for me in my circumstances. So am I “ahead”, or am I “behind”? Yes! I have a feeling that you, having experienced more than one major “transition” in your own life, may understand exactly what I mean there!:-P (others may be born there already, while you had to struggle to get there, and vice versa) But no matter how painful, those struggles are also what define us and give us character so… tbh I probably would have skipped them, but I am also grateful, in a tiny way, that I am who I am now, and can appreciate so much that I otherwise would not have been able to - if that makes any sense whatsoever?

I would guess that people love you b/c you seem to have genuine empathy + depth both. That seems… rare these days. It should NOT be, and you would not think it, but given how often people take advantage, it does seem to be like a beautiful flower that gets mowed over quickly as if it were some weed that people feel the need to stamp out quickly:-(. Especially on the interwebz. If you want, you can use that power to make people feel better - as you already do, but I mean consciously! - but ofc I hope you also hold it in check, so that you manage to meet your own needs as well (which are ofc interconnected to helping others, so it truly is a balance there, not just all one or all the other way). I feel like it is good to be Masters of ourselves rather than the other way around. Which ironically… I accomplish by giving in to my desires? But like, making sure that I acknowledge ALL of those, not hyper-fixate on just one at any given moment.

Bring on the part 2 then! When you are ready. I know what you mean about ownership - I have nothing now but one day if I ever could, the thought of needing to do that worries me. As it probably should:-). 💫

I thought the article was saying that it already has told, in that yes it is?:-P

John Stewart (Daily Show) had a great message yesterday about what we were talking about wrt Trump: people around his orbit say one thing, but do the exact opposite irl, revealing how it is authoritarian BS and currying favor rather than reality. But he says it much better than I ever could so I will let you hear it from him.

It’s (downvoting) trash behaviour from sad people.

I need to talk with you a lot more often - this is stuff I need to hear:-). Speaking of, I am glad to hear that your mental health is improving. I thought mine was too but it is hard to navigate the storms of life and my sense of self is still tied up in the wrong things.:-( Then again, I will meditate on it and it becomes an opportunity to do better and grow… so that’s always a boon. Nobody enjoys those opportunities, but we do become so much better - less Monkey, more Mind - as a result:-).

Though when they fail, the price of groceries will go up, primarily affecting those who can least afford it. It is all a tangled, interconnected web:-(.

I want these people to be free to live however they wish. But I do NOT agree that their votes should be worth several magnitudes more than mine:-(.

And warm:-).

This is part 2, space timey wimy goodness:

It is fundamentally difficult to grasp, yeah. CS Lewis has an illustration that I will borrow blatantly steal outright: imagine an outside entity who “sees” the entire trajectory of your life as a line, with all its twists and curves, and then, perhaps on a whim or to make it more beautiful art, decides to “outline” it, like maybe a highlighter or let us rather say one line “above”/to the left and another line “below”/to the right of it. From your perspective, your life appears “hemmed in”, outlined, bordered by those two lines - as if you had no choices in the matter? Yet, that outside agent was the one who drew the lines, but following YOUR choices! That at least is the simplistic version, but it gets even weirder if, while the outside agent is drawing those outlining lines, your own lifeline changes in response. So if the agent starts drawing from the beginning of your life to the end, the final trajectory could change - according to YOUR choices, but in response to THEIR choices, which were themselves based on YOUR choices to begin with. Notice the caveat inherent in that: the “you” may change, from an alternate-reality you without interference from that outside agent, to now the “you” that has done so.

Even weirder, what if that “outside agent”, who I mentioned earlier plays you like a chess piece pawn, isn’t “God” or whatever, but YOU! In that case, “you” are the video game or storybook or whatever character, but in this formulation, the external agent is also YOU - moreover it would be the REAL you, whereas the one inside this reality is the lesser version. Ofc, here you must somehow have “forgotten” your true, higher self. And as you brought up, there may not be a 1:1 correlation between each of us down here vs. ourselves up there - all humans could come from just 1 or a few up there, or whatever. Anything is possible there, and we are only limited by our imaginations here. What we know for certain here is that what Religion tells us in this regard is fundamentally flawed and wrong - b/c it is inconsistent e.g. even the people saying so do not practice what they preach - but we do not necessarily know what the True reality is. Now we see only in part. I still like thinking along those lines b/c there are multiple ways to be wrong, and thereby thinking along several different lines could help lead us to Truth - e.g. we might not be “actually” one being (I sincerely doubt it, I see no evidence of it at least), but is there any doubt that we are all “connected” nonetheless?

you should never really be interacting with the same person twice.

This one hits me hard - my (autism-spectrumed?) brain constantly forgets this and wants to pick up right where it left off - more a reflection of my own reduced capacity to handle things than anything to do with reality. Speaking of, I had already forgotten that beautiful perspective that you had shared with me about nations changing. Stuff at my job, weird weather, for a few days my exercise schedule has been interrupted and I am just “off”, and just like that it had already slipped through my fingers, again. Maybe, or at least I mean it did at the conscious level. That said, I tend not to try to hold onto anything too strongly, trusting that if it is good that it will find its way back to me in time. That… is nowhere close to true though:-(, and yet I know that I CANNOT hold onto things no matter how I try, so it is demotivating to even try.

And I think there is an evolutionary reason for this: community. No one person - a sage on a mountaintop lets say - can or even should really try to have it all, all the knowledge, all the wisdom, all the perfection. Rather, if we choose to surround ourselves with those who are worthwhile, and distance ourselves from idiots (it seems sad but what else can you do but that? they are hell-bent on their own destruction, and they will absolutely take you down with them!), then we can keep reminding ourselves of these beautiful Truths.

Or, so I say anyway, but then I don’t actually DO it - oopsie, I guess I too am one of those who says one thing yet does the polar opposite, an “idiot” even. As too are we all, but one difference, not sure I can take “credit” for any of it but just saying it as a fact (or so it seems to me): some of us, for whatever reason, desire to know the Truth, and Reason, and Mind, while some of us, again for whatever reason, do not. THAT makes all the difference in the world, b/c I will eventually find what I seek, with effort + time, while they literally never will (and even if they stumbled upon it, they would set it back down again without realizing its significance). So I am grateful that I care, and therefore… almost grateful for the pain that I lived through that made me care. Most people would have no idea whatsoever what that means, but I don’t even need to explain it further than that, b/c you already do.

I hope these thoughts are at least halfway entertaining:-D.