I'm really pissed off right now, at both US political parties, at human nature, at a lot of things, so this may not be the best time for me to sound off on a question like this. This may go long. I get into some grizzly topics like Suicide, the Holocaust and how laziness is a fake thing invented by capitalists and Calvinists.
So I learned early on the fucked up nature of capitalism and the laziness rhetoric accompanied with the Protestant work ethic. My parents were glad to criticize my avolition (that's the medical term for the symptom of not wanting to do anything), but then I was suffering from neglect on account that they both worked full work weeks and were too exhausted to parent.
This is to say, mental illness and family dysfunction often are intergenerational. They were also driven by their parents to work themselves to exhaustion, and they did, and I became a stereotypical gen-x latchkey kid. Anyway, Mom tried an experiment, of paying me by the chore rather than a weekly allowance while I'd have regular house-chore duties. She'd then not pay me if my work was not up to snuff, and I learned quickly that all my efforts couldn't get it to snuff (I really tried, but I was a kid, and she wasn't good at telling me what she wanted). I stopped working entirely, resigned to have no allowance, and stopped working, and that just wouldn't do.h
I wouldn't be diagnosed with Major Depression until my adulthood, and I'd discover that at my most symptomatic, I could lay down in bed for months, barely able to get up to eat or poop and having the libido of a lump of granite and the inertia of a neutron star.
Contrast the people who lucked out in The Great Resignation of 2021 During the COVID-19 Lockdown people defied their industrialist bosses and Calvinist ministers and found they could not couch potato out for more than a week or two without getting a severe case of cabin fever. (People who winter in high-snow areas already know this phenomenon, and Steven King's The Shining is inspired by centuries of worst case scenarios.) Most people took up hobbies, turned their houses into lego parks, took up wood carving or cooking or something, and a lot of those things became marketable skills, hence a lot of Take this job and shove it and a sudden dearth of people willing to suffer abuse, toxic workspaces and a less-than-sustenance wage.
Laziness isn't a thing. If someone is healthy and happy, they'll do all the chores. Granted some chores are tedious or arduous or hazardous. In my pinko communist fantasies, I imagine we take some queues hfrom Power Wash Simulator until we figure out how to automate the process, and then automate the maintenance and repair of the machines that do that job, then automate maintenance of the bots that do the maintenance and repair until one guy keeps an eye on the one dial while writing poetry.
Speaking of communism, Marx predicted enshiffication of products and jobs in Das Kapital and our industrialist masters made it clear they liked it when the working class was living in Hoover towns (of cardboard boxes and paint cans) and eating flour paste (and dying of malnutrition). And they don't mind at all that their employees need food stamps and are living in their car (and sleeping roughly).
There's a cute bit in the John Scalzi short story Morning Announcements at the Lucas Interspecies School for Troubled Youth where the announcer (not the principal) is talking about the graduating class, and his well wishes and high hopes for them. And then he notes one species_who will, after graduation, be bussed to the downtown stadium to begin mating challenges that will leave nine out of ten of you dead..._
That's us. Human beings, in capitalism. There's never enough work. Allegations of meritocracy imply that the least of us will be unfit and will be disposed of like Spartans tossing their imperfect infants into the Kaiadas cave chasm to perish on the rocks. The beggars, widows and orphans we're supposed to watch out for (and is why Sodom was firebombed in myth) we leave to languish in homelessness, or in prison for failing to fit in and work hard enough.
And here in the states that class of undesirables continues to expand.
Granted more than 10% of us persevere, but somewhere between 66% and 88% of US households live in precarity, which means they worry every night about whether the next week is their last. Most of us are not within the hunky-dory threshold, by far.
In my case, staring blankly at the recent US general election results, I know I don't want to end up homeless, or arrested and in a detention center (whether stuck in a crowded cell, compelled to forced labor or awaiting my turn in the genocide machine). I'm far away from these outcomes for the moment, but the coming administration makes my fate a lot more unpredictable. So I'm looking for an L-pill or other functional exit strategy, in case I need to evade arrest once I am unpersoned.
And this has led me to an interesting discovery. Society doesn't want to think about its casualties. I deal with suicidality every day. Usually it's just considering it. But even professional therapists tend to freak out when I talk about it. Also, in the aughts, I went on a deep dive into the Holocaust, what steps were taken from the concentration camps started by Heydrich's Sicherheitsdienst to the Pogroms along the eastern front to the massive extermination machine of Auschwitz. So I'm familiar that societies don't mind deaths when they happen quietly in the cold, or in the systems. They mind them when they're out front and messy and require a lot of cleanup. This is why self-immolation protests are terrifying, and even though there's not enough of them to change hearts and minds, they are a wake up call that our autocratic masters fear.
In reality, the US is suffering from a suicide epidemic. Our rate (about 40K a year in the 2010s and climbing) is worse than Japan (who is much more okay with suicide, though they're trying to change that) and worse than Russia (Russia's having a no-good very bad...Putin). For every one dead body from suicide, another three or four end up in the emergency room for trying, but survive, or are stopped by a friend. Also we're pretty sure some families will obfuscate the cause of death and attribute it to accident (or in David Carradine's case, literal ninjas) so they don't have to deal with the public questions about suicide.
But curiously life does suck for most of us, and we're waiting our turn in the showers, or out in the cold, or ultimately for the water to run out so we can't make enough food.
I'm not going to advocate harming yourself or others, but I will say playing by the rules is silly, and there's no way they'll let you into the cool kids club. Ever. You were never meant to win. Go arty. Go renegade. Go crazy. Go unpredictable.
I'm tired. I'll give this a grammar pass later.
Yes, for us, a gram of caffeine is a double-whopper of a dose (about seven cups of strong coffee). Meanwhile a termite eating caffeine-laced wood gets a dose far greater in proportion to its body weight.
Just remember as much as humans suck, there's something in nature doing something as perverse, or as heinous. Sure, we have limited empathy, so are inclined to sometimes know better. But we generally don't know better enough.
Caffeine is the same thing. A poison to termites ( HUUUGE BUZZZZZZZ! ) that gives us a rush when we microdose it.
While I'm totally behind a world where Frank Zappa lives longer, the political problems of the US federal government are systemic. The Democratic party moved left out of necessity to oppose the Republican party, who has been trying to restore autocracy since the 1933 Business Plot failed, and FDR implemented the New Deal to prevent Communist revolution (because anything is better than living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste to live.)
The card / board game Chrononauts expansion The Gore Years imagines an alternative in which the GOP delays of the Florida Recount were not successful, allowing Gore to win, but Andrew Looney posits a result of a Palin administration in 2008. To be fair, he also imagines avoiding WWII (hard to do) might create a period of European peaceful prosperity, so YMMV.
The 2024 election is an indictment not just of Americans but of the viability of democracy in a world where billionaires exists who can create disinformation campaigns that can convince the masses to make uninformed decisions against their own personal interests. In fact, the entire 20th century in the US has been a master class in how to subvert democracy, so even if we were able to reform federal elections (eliminate the EC, insert ranked choice voting or some other non-FPTP election model) elections may continue to be controlled by demagogy and massive propaganda machines.
We don't know (all of) what must be done, but we do know neither US major political parties will willingly relinquish power to move towards public serving government. Considering how much it appears someone is fucking with a time machine to meddle with the past since at least 2000, Frank Zappa may yet live again.
I am left handed and enby.
Though the correlation intersection is between enby (or peripheral to gender norms) and ASD, which is a broad intersection. It also informs my penchant for over-explaining things.
I'm not mansplaining, it's that the connectedness excites me like dinosaurs excite a toddler!
ETA Re: Anbidexterity, when I was in kindergarten I could, for a very short while, do letters with either hand and it was so cool. Then, in a playground accident, I broke my right forearm, so I learned to write while my right hand was in a cast. But yeah, I played piano (out of practice, now), and while I do mouse stuff with my left hand, I still joystick with my right hand due to early gaming on someone else's computer.
That said, for fine work or throwing, I do that with my left hand.
PSS: That all said, computer input devices come in three flavors: Right handed, ambidextrous and rare, often not great left handed devices I don't like. Usually I do ambidextrous options.
Fuck Around and Find Out through the lens of The Scottish Play, so yes. Also noting that the weird sisters show up when someone's about to FA so they can watch the FO part.
Get MacDruled (OC)
An early meme that did not pass muster when I showed it to family, but it makes me giggle.
I may just be an esoteric nerd.
I'm developing a memeset of really common criticisms I have with the psychiatric sector, having been through it a lot and having expressed a lot of these as concerns to my new therapist / psychiatrist.
Speaking of which I'm freshly in therapy after a long stint without! Yay!
I keep having thoughts. Dangerous, untoward MCU Supervillain thoughts.
For instance, the reason we stopped doing outlawry ( wikipedia ) as a thing is because when you unperson someone, their only defense is to fight back and hide, and if that means a wondering child happens upon your camp, well, dead kids tell no tales.
So at the point that a given group is treated is stripped of rights enough that it threatens their life (say putting someone at risk for morbid pregnancy complications, or a homeless person needing to sleep) they are required by necessity ( wikipedia ) to defend themselves violently, since defending themselves procedurally is useless.
Which means it is right and proper for those people to stab anyone whose awareness of them and their predicament is a threat. And it's right and proper to stab the monarchists who would strip us of our rights. Looking at you SCOTUS.
Oh good, so different from using Terrorists to justify the surveillance state.
Speaking of which the NSA Haiku Generator has been lifeboated!
Consul Leak Toxic
DDOS Agro Burst
Hazmat Ebola
Our surveillance goons are bored and lonely! Give them something to scan every day! 👋
To me it looks like someone in the design department messed up.
And this is what we can expect from enshittified companies!
The same folks that want to unperson women (and non-whites, and LGBT+) are the same folks who are poisoning our air until 500-year hurricanes become the norm, and we run out water and can't feed everyone.
So we're at a point that killing them for their transgressions is literally fighting for our lives and for humanity.
I think we're one step away from suicide bombers. After all, if we're going to be executed anyhow...
Eventually it will present a problem. An example of this happened not long ago when Iranian woman Mahsa Amini was harassed to death by the Iranian morality police, and the people decided that was one Iranian woman too many. The humiliation campaign followed, leading to hangings which lead to revolutionaries firebombing official buildings. A lot of people shot each other. A curious development was when the fundamentalists were bombing women's schools with poisonous gas.
There eventually was an armistice and a negotiation, but the morality police still kills women by overpolicing, so it goes on.
Here in the states, we already have minorities and undesirables getting overpoliced to death by officers eager to use their guns or show them who is boss. When Trump opens the slips again, shit is going to get interesting. (As in that Chinese curse interesting. )
I also assure you in the meantime, Afghani men get a lot of food served with extra ingredients. Spite and resentment do not sit idly by.
I guess it's not premium enough.
It reminds me of Unlimited data mobile services in which the data is not turned off or surcharged but throttled to a crawl after a limited time. We've not since been able to get a straight answer from any of the major telecom providers.
Marx predicts enshittification in Das Kapital
I need this right now, and I bet so do rule.
Art by Erik Carnell one of the LGBT+ artists who was featured in Target during Pride and then removed thanks to white Christian nationalist pressure.
So here we are, and yeah, we need you all.
All Hallows Rule in America
Note: Most of the info here was ripped from the most recent You're Wrong About podcast ( On Buzzsprout ), Halloween History with Chelsey Weber-Smith Go! Listen! Enjoy! Tell 'em Large Marge sent ya!
Yesterday, I learned that the current American Halloween tradition of giving candy to costumed kids represents an uneasy truce between civilization and the trickster spirit.
There are a lot of traditions regarding Samhain, many of which include bonfires and naked dancing (because they all included bonfires and naked dancing. Who are we kidding?) But in the Irish farmlands, Samhain was mischief night, at least for adolescent and young adult boys (we assume they were boys.)
The idea was to haze the local grownups, particularly the crabby ones who yelled at clouds or didn't like young'uns much. There were plenty of old standby pranks: carving faces into produce or shepherding livestock to the rooftops to dressing up like ghosts and monsters and ambushing them at night to send them running.
It was a mostly accepted tradition. Teenagers got to go bananas for one day a year, and were (more or less) on good better behavior for the rest of the time. Skittish folk did the Purge thing of holing up in safety.
And then the Irish and their wily teenagers came to the United States.
Our Halloween pumpkin-smashers were called guisers from those in disguise. Note that there were other guising traditions that exchanged DNA with our dark cabal of malicious tricksters. (One fond one was of drunkards who'd sing at your house until you gave them food, beer or money to leave), but for our antagonists, it was the black bloc of the time, a means to ensure that you weren't identified at the scene of a fresh crime.
Do an image search of "vintage halloween costumes" and you won't see people trying to look like Mario or Misty or Mickey or Megatron, but just people in spooky clothes and spookier masks clearly up to no good. You didn't buy your costume, rather you made it with whatever was on hand, and hence there were a lot of sheet ghosts.
In the early 20th century pranking in the States achieved an apogee (a nadir?). The great depression drove everyone to despair, and wanton destruction that once was meager and required a morning of repair might be the fire that broke the farm. Also some pranks went wrong, leading to a resonance cascade failure, starting a wildfire or other unnatural disaster.
And then WWII happened and we were not only trying to salvage what we can, but had real (alleged) monsters that might even be infiltrating the homefront as we speak. Pranksters then were losing the war for the Allies and serving the Axis, even if inadvertently.
Something had to be done, and even President Truman got involved regarding The Halloween Problem.
A couple of early attempts to trade Halloween for a nicer holiday failed drastically, and the pranking continued.
Eventually an armistice came when the neighborhood spooky pageant emerged. Creative neighbors would turn a part of their house into a spooky diorama and light the path with candles and jack-o-lanterns and other Halloween kitsch. Rather than hopping onto a war-wagon (that's a mischief team stuffed into a motor vehicle) they'd go visit the local spooktaculars. (This would in turn fuel the haunted house craze, assisted by Disney's Haunted Mansion opening in 1953)
Feeding the roaming guests kept the rotten eggs away. While there was candy, there were also cookies, apples, (toothbrushes, Chick tracts) and other treats. Sometimes there were activities, though I never could figure out bobbing for apples.
The transition from free-form snacks to packaged candy came due to The Candyman who was much less exciting than the movie version. Ronald Clark O'Bryan made custom Pixy Stix laced with potassium cyanide, one of which he fed to his son, Timothy on Halloween, 1974. He was far removed from a master criminal, and inconsistencies in his story kept the police interested until it all fell apart. He was also deep in debt and took out a beefy life-insurance policy on his son. The police didn't have to investigate too deeply.
O'Bryan was executed in 1984, but by then the damage he had done to Halloween had been done, and moral panics would persist about tampered Halloween treats. By then it was common for everyone to just give packaged candy.
Related was also the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. They had nothing to do with Halloween, but secured into the public conscience that people could tamper with products in order to cause mayhem to the general public. And at least by my recollection, this not only ended all Halloween offerings of home-made cookies by kitchen-minded families but also made sure safety seals were added to every food and hygiene product in the US.
By the aughts, everyone was familiar with the "fun-sized" candy which was totally not that fun.
(It's noted by some that Tylenol doesn't really need all that much assistance to poison you. As painkillers go, it's hard on the system, easy to overdose, and Tylenol poisoning incurs a yearly body count in the US. There's been an ongoing effort to convince the FDA to rethink its approval of Tylenol, for convincing cause. But big pharma really wants to keep selling you stuff. Anyway I digress.)
These days, we hear a lot of calls from the religious right for the end of celebrations of Halloween, a holiday too macabre for families who purport to have family values. Many churches tell their parishioners to skip the holiday for Jesus, while more clever churches simply hold a party there as an alternative to trick-or-treating. Some churches forbid witches, or even only allow approved costumes from the approved costume list. There's a lot of, as Dan McClellan would put it, costly identity signaling between members of right-wing religious ministries to show they're on team-purity.
But this is not a holiday we celebrate to honor benign gods and favored spirits. This is not an Apollonian holiday we keep up for the morale of the people, rather it's a Dionysian holiday, one we celebrate in respect for spirits who would wrong us if we don't acknowledge their presence and the unsteady peace they offer in exchange for our tribute.
Hallowe'en as it is celebrated in the US is a rite we engage in every year to keep away malevolent trickster monsters, who will return (and will start fires) if we don't placate them with yearly treats.
Biblical plothole? (Adam and Eve v. Good and Evil)
Refrigerator logic, or a shower thought:
According to Genesis, God forbids Adam and Eve from eating fruit of the tree of wisdom, specifically of knowledge of good and evil.
Serpent talks to Eve, calling out God's lie: God said they will die from eating the fruit (as in die quickly, as if the fruit were poisonous). They won't die from the fruit, Serpent tells them. Instead, their eyes will open and they will understand good and evil.
And Adam and Eve eat of the fruit of the tree of wisdom, learning good and evil (right and wrong, or social mores). And then God evicts them from paradise for disobedience.
But if the eating the fruit of the tree of wisdom gave Adam and Eve the knowledge of good and evil, this belies they did not know good and evil in the first place. They couldn't know what forbidden means, or that eating from the tree was wrong. They were incapable of obedience.
Adam and Eve were too unintelligent (immature? unwise?) to understand, much like telling a toddler not to eat cookies from the cookie jar on the counter.
Putting the tree unguarded and easily accessible in the Garden of Eden was totally a setup
Am I reading this right?
The best orgies were those thrown by the esoteric order.
Only too late would we discover what would become of our children.
(More terror than horror, but I think qualifies.)
The Rule Went Down To Georgia... (OC)
We recently had this conversation and I realized I have new headcannon.
Required rule ffprobe not found
{"data":{"msg":"Required command ffprobe not found, make sure it exists in pict-rs'\ $PATH","files":null},"state":"success"}
This is what I get when I try to u/l a picture from the Lemmy instance website (Blåhaj)
< sadface >
Dark and Nightshade's Pandemonium Carnival and Shadow Show
Courtesy of Ray Bradbury, of course.
(We assume Jim took the deal.)
Pride Frogs
Not OC.
If I'm the one responsible for posting Pride memes for June, then every day will be moldy Monday.
Oglaf: Wrath
Oglaf from a couple Sundays ago. ( source ). Less about the issue of theism so much as theocratic rule, but applicable to past and present.