bats full of shame

I <3 not having to choose between belonging and my personal freedom, authenticity, safety, autonomy, privacy, peace etc.

I don't think anyone has so far been able to create a community like that without having it devolve into an unsafe space for anyone who isn't a bully or abuser, or just an unpleasant space with tons of bickering and personal drama.

Community is great! As long as you aren't stuck in it. The moment you (feel like) you can't leave, people will try to take advantage, even if unintentionally — and having to set boundaries and protect yourself against that all the time is just tiring.

Meanwhile, if it's purely voluntary on everyone's part and you know you could all leave at any time, that's when you can have some really healthy relationships that will actually make your life better. When everyone understands that if they treat someone badly, they will leave, it happens a lot less, and repair is actually possible.

We're all stuck here—nobody worth listening to actually thinks space colonialism is a realistic alternative to fixing earth—and the people currently doing the most harm know they will be able to get away with it in large part because we can't leave. This is our planet. There is no other one.

On a smaller scale, most of us can't even escape our landlords. Or our bosses. The police. The military. Abusive household members. Interpersonal violence in our local communities in the form of racism, sexism, queerphobia, transphobia etc. For most people in the world, leaving their country for somewhere with better living conditions isn't even an option or it'd require them to risk their lives, and your position in the capitalist system is also determined by where the rich need you to be. If they need easily exploited gig workers more than full-time workers with benefits and large salaries, that's going to impact your career choices. That's a hell of a lot of coercion that's just perfectly normal and inescapable for most people.

If we wanted to have truly free societies, it'd require a lot of very powerful people to first give up their power voluntarily. Which isn't going to happen. So we'd have to take it away from them. And I don't think we'll ever do that because even out of those people who aren't rich & powerful, it seems like most of them still sympathize more with the rich & powerful than with people of their own class or lower.

One of the reasons people don't intervene when there is abuse happening is, I believe, that they find it easier to see themselves as an abuser than a victim.

Amaka Umeh as DEE PHARMA

How have I never heard of the movie Cruising with Al Pacino before

How have I never heard of the movie Cruising with Al Pacino before

Other takeaways include the starting price for the cybertruck include the starting price being $39,990 and the actual sale being over $100K,

the fact that the Edsel, I found out, has all the PRNDL gears as buttons sounding the horn. So if you honk the horn with your palm you might go into park, reverse, neutral, what have you. Thankfully the cybertruck has the gears as a finger swiping mechanism on the touch screen to avoid this. No mistakes there!