I think the state in this case needs to be divided into adversarial and non-adversarial departments (or subdepartments). It’s better to tell (for example) the water department you don’t know whether the pipes are lead if that’s the case, rather than forcing them to unearth copper pipes or letting them leave lead pipes.

But it is absolutely appropriate (assuming you believe in strong rights to privacy) to insert NSA keywords into benign communications, so that NSA wastes time on your false positives, but that’s because NSA isn’t supposed to be doing mass surveillance of the public, rather is supposed to be helping develop communication security that is impervious to surveillance.

If your local precinct actually works with the community, doesn’t harass minorities and doesn’t rob civilians via asset forfeiture, it might be worth giving them sound information (including saying you don’t know what you don’t know.) On the other hand if it behaves typically for law enforcement in the US, leading them to chase geese will save everyone else trouble.

As someone who doesn’t get the gender feelies at all, dresses and sarongs are cool (as in, good for warm weather). High socks are so amazing that everyone wore them for much of the middle ages (they’re warm!). Called hosen wool socks and a tunic was ordinary commoner attire. (And yes, your nethers and janglies were free to the open air underneath. Laundry without machines was too labor intensive for non-nobles to have underwear.)

Makeup is weird, but looking amazing is fun. (My experience with it was on stage, and putting on eyeliner was hard to do without flinching.)

While I can appreciate a cool tool (say tweezers with a magnifying lens attached) tactical stuff painted black doesn’t make sense in contrast to stuff painted a bright color that can easily be seen (on the assumption that I’m not in combat hidden in cover), bright pink is fine except when everything else is also bright pink. (A lot of beach dayglo colors are meant to be well offset against the ocean greens and blues).

Now that’s on the practical side. Some folks get a HUGE buzz from representing according to their gender identity. Trans folk know this because wearing the stuff they like is weird in contrast to the stuff that mom bought them while they were growing up, so they’ve had cause to actually explore this aspect of themselves.

But there are guys who like to double down on butchness and gals who like getting ready for the night out more than the going out, itself. And then there are dudes who, no matter how masculine they represent, feel inadequate and wussy, which likely informs alpha male rhetoric and the far-right man-o-sphere pundits.

To be fair, if we look close, we see ecosystems within ecosystems, including a buttload of predation and two buttloads of parasitism. Parasites capitalizing on other lifeforms to utilize their energy and resources for their own growth and reproduction, as far as the eye can see.

And that’s what human society is. It’s much less prone to top-down parasitism in tiny societies (less than 500 members) but when we have communities of millions and states of tens of millions, it’s pretty easy for religious ministries and ideological politicians to take over the system to make giant militaries that hammer other, less-captured societies.

Every once in a while some of us get the idea, what if we make a system that doesn’t involve parasitism. I bet we can make everyone pretty happy. And this is true, except that the parasites really like having ridiculous amounts of wealth and power, and would rather render the entire species extinct than be confined to being a (well-to-do, comfortable) commoner.

This is why, even though there have been successful anarcho-communist organizations, they are often attacked by state law enforcement acting not in enforcing law, but in preserving political power.

No war but class war.

Death to monarchists.

We started with an unlimited workweek (often 12+ hours a day all day) and reduced it to 40 hours with a weekend and a paid lunch. (Remember the movie 9 to 5 that was typical. Then it became 9-6 with unpaid lunch.)

Around the Reagan era, Osha got defunded so it didn’t have time to deal with all the labor violations, which was part of the enshittification.

Who knew it would lead to a nazi uprising?

Turns out everyone did. The industrialist intellegentsia actually warned this would happen based on historical precedent, but the boomer generation was all fuck the future including their own kids. To be fair, prior generations hating later generatiobs was the norm by the time it was their turn.

Wait, didn’t this all get turned into a rock musical on Broadway?

Both!

Ice Cream (1964)
Evelyne Axell
Banned on Facebook

Rage like California wildfire.

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). Resigned to have no allowance, I stopped working, entirely, and that just wouldn’t do.

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.

EVOLUTION DOESN’T CARE ABOUT HAPPY

Appreciate your gut bacteria. They love you too.

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.

Frog frog. 🐸🐸

(Note we still only have a frog face emoji and not a full frog emoji)

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.

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.

Relevant conversation from 2016