Being able to tell each other complicated information is empowering. If you can’t read well you will be taken advantage of. Taking back your ability to read is a victory over your schools that were built to keep you down. I don’t know how to help you, but I hope you find a way to win it back.

Despite what genocidal despots want you to think, material analyisis is not synonymous with Marxism-Leninism.

This is the way. Voluntary support of artists rather than mandatory support of IP holders and gatekeepers.

Relaxing is something people do just because they can’t simply do fun things. Like sex, drugs, games, and the kind of stuff that makes you famous.

Come to Saṃsāra, we have cookies.

All my ancestors up to 6 generations back were born in the same 200 kilometer radius circle. Most of them did not die in the town where they were born.

People move. They are displaced by war and natural disaster, they go on pilgrimages, they go to the city to get rare goods, they migrate to places with more prosperity and more jobs, they learn trade skills from schools or from experts, they find causes they believe in or causes that pay well, they go to festivals and plays and celebrity performances, and they marry.

This was true in the 19th century, but also in the 15th and the 6th and the 40th BCE. Migration is normal. People live rich and complicated lives. For a peasant, one of the sons might inherit the farm, but his wife is from out of town and the other siblings find other things to do that take them elsewhere. Serfs may be bound to the land, but a lord will usually offer dispensation if it is in his interest, and arrange for festivals to keep his stock fresh. And slaves were traded often to prevent them from forming attachments. And burghers, clergy, and nobility naturally tended to travel far.

That’s why you hang out with other voids, so all they see is a formless mass sending out unpredictable pseudopods.

The romantic subplot is weak, and the core premise of its political analysis - linguistic relativity - has since been falsified. Many people were actively mislead by it presenting linguistic relativity as fact, feeding a narrative that by creating queer language (and post-moderninsm in general) we are creating queer people (and other post-modern “degeneracy”) that stuck around at least until the 2010s.

It can still be read as a more vague post-truth dystopia where all the other methods of suppression are understated and where newspeak is magically powerful, and its prose is fine, but I definitely wouldn’t put it above anything written by Ursula LeGuin.

EMDR works if and only if you have single points of intense trauma; when you can’t talk like an adult because of how overwhelming the memory is.

If it helps to ground it outside of capitalism, it’s basically the reinvention of intense spiritual cleansing rituals, as found in many cultures. Prompt someone to think about the evil thing, apply busy sensory stimulus, and make them engage with that stimulus through call and response. Guide them through, walking the line between getting lost to the evil and stalling out.

Whether justified as the work of ancestors, spirits, gods, modes of consciousness, christ, or a neurological ddos attack, people are healed by it often enough for the ritual to persist.

Wait you still expect fair viable-for-the-DNC-candidate elections next cycle?

If your efforts in “building to the future” hinge on a Democratic presidency, then I’m sorry but all your work will be for naught. You have to build for the possibility of Republicans or worse in a system as democratic as Russia.

Even if I’m wrong, there is still a 50-50 chance the Republican candidate will win, and you have to build for that eventuality too.

So sure, vote in every election, but build infrastructure to overthrow fascism now.

She got the problem solved while heavily under the influence of narcotics. Seems rude to call that “not being made for emergency situations”.

Microsoft is betting on technofascism. On an economy where labor - and most importantly military-industrial labor - has been automated to such an extent that consumption is irrelevant. Consumers won’t have money to buy their shitty software anyway and governments and private military organisations will be running their increasingly automated mass murder programs on Azure servers. As they already did for the Palestinian genocide.

I’ve been on estrogen longer than the confederacy existed.

Depends on the model and training regimen. So likely no; it’s an engineering problem and they have good engineers and money to burn.

And practice lethal community self-defense (i.e. well-organized militias). Lanchester’s Square Law makes individual self defense almost irrelevant compared to community organizing.

Suppose for simplicity that skill, equipment, preparation, etc. all balance out and everybody is equally capable of killing others.

Then, if there are 5 assailants and 1 of you there is a 1/6 chance you shoot one of them, and 100% chance you die.

But if there are 5 of you and 5 of them, the situation is symmetrical. One side will have 4 casualties, the other 5, and it’s a coin toss which.

And if there are 25 of you and 5 of them, the situation is reversed, and you’ll walk away with one or two casualties.

By increasing your numbers 5-fold, you increase your effectiveness 25-fold.

The law doesn’t apply when you’re outranged, like if they decide to do artillery bombardment like in the Battle of Bunker Hill, but guerilla tactics and infrastructure can mitigate that.

I’m not changing phone ecosystems, as I enjoy having some marginal level of control over* the hardware I fucking purchased*.

Open source android forks exist. Open source operating systems exist. Phones that natively run both exist. Do you mean that you specifically enjoy having maginal control, no more, no less?

Good job spotting the ironic tension! Now can you explain how the paragraphs below it help resolve that tension?

Statistically, humans that are allowed to go outside probably live a shorter amount of time than indoor humans too, if they are otherwise taken care of just as well.

Water doesn’t have to be the thing that brings variation. Titan has a methane “hydrology” with clouds, rivers, valleys, and beaches whose sand is made of ice. On Triton, ammonia cryovulcanism powered by tidal forces from Neptune create plains with ammonnia snowfall, ice mountain ranges, and underground lakes. On Miranda, the planet is ice, but there are massive terrain differences from 10 km cliffs to flatlands. Io has a massive variety of volcanic planes with color differences visible from space because of their entirely different chemical compositions. The turbulent atmosphere of Jupiter is streaks of water vapor clouds, upwellings from deep beneath the surface, cyclones and massive pressure drops that dent the atmosphere inward by kilometers, with ionosphere above and gas as dense as water below. Even an atmosphere-less grey rock like Mercury has basalt plains, craters, ridges, highlands and dust plains.

In No Man’s Sky, many planets have life, which requires complex chemistry being possible at the temperatures the planet has using the chemicals that are available on that planet. This then naturally creates temperatures that are “too cold” for that life and “too warm” for that life, and complex adaptations made by that life to take resources from places that get “too cold” or “too warm” with less risk of predation or competition. Similar adaptation is possible to other extremes/variations, such as “submerged”, “on land”, “flying”, “too dry”, “too few nutrients”, “too acidic”, “too basic”, “too steep”, “cave”, etc. And thus we get complex biospheres that vary across the planet.

I don’t think they’re lazy cowards - or rather, I think “lazy cowards” is something lazy cowards say to explain away lazy cowards they disagree with - I think they grow up in an environment where admitting fault or even suspending judgment is something that will get you attacked or taken advantage of. Whether by parents, teachers, classmates, friends, politicians, cops, priests, or gods.

Children aren’t great at lying. If they don’t believe they are a good person, people will notice that self-doubt and take advantage. Believing you are axiomatically good is safer, protecting you from bullies of all kinds who are looking for someone who won’t resist being punished.

Properly dealing with climate change often requires a major lifestyle change that is largely outside of people’s control. It’s natural that people who haven’t processed their childhood schemas would respond to it according to those schemas, and that for people whose childhood schemas are centered around avoiding responsibility they respond by stall tactics like pretending climate change isn’t real so people waste time proving it to them.

You chose to write a comment to another human being about how you would like to be treated. Imagine if, through doing that, the people you still have to interact with in your daily life learn to actually treat you that way - that too is community.

A neighbor getting groceries for you so you don’t have to go for an overstimulating store and so you can have them arrive at your door within a one minute interval from 10:00 to 10:01 on tuesday and friday is community. Someone tailoring your shirts so you don’t notice any friction against your skin anymore is community.

The tools that capitalism can provide are depersonalized, poorly fitting, and often malicious, but a community can work with you can come to understand you and learn to fit your needs better than anything you’re likely to be able to buy.