Stephen Dann

i thought you aware on how awful people can be since judging from things you reblog you are aware of ongoing genocide and witnessing autistic children abused for their condition

Every day I choose to believe that every human being is fundamentally the same. That every adult was once a child, that every child had fears and hopes and joys, and every person desires to live happily and free of pain.

This does not absolve them of their cruelties. This does not condone or minimize their transgressions. This simply is to say, "I too could become monstrous: what would it take to push me there, and how could I prevent it, and if I could not prevent it, how could I stop?"

I believe that to be human is to be an animal like any other. I believe that we are not evil. Because if I believed that humanity was evil, fundamentally cruel, and incapable of better, what hope would I have? What purpose? What life could I live, as a plague surrounded by plagues?

I don't believe that people are good because I have not seen evil actions. I believe that people are good because I have to.

Do you understand?

I must believe in humanity. I must believe in kindness. I must believe in good, and change, and positive intent.

Because otherwise, I'd have nothing to live for.

Because otherwise, all I would have is myself, and self-loathing, and decades of existence in all directions, and a hopeless wasteland to spend it in.

If humanity is just monstrosity in clothing, then all is pointless, and we are forever incapable of change. Which, frankly, is bullshit.

Cruelty is a choice. Evil is a choice. Inflicting pain is a choice. The naive view forgives those deliberate choices because it's simplier to believe humans have nothing to offer but cruelty, than to have to face the fact that certain people have chosen, with intent and action, to be cruel.

Forgiving such actions as a natural default state is not worldwise, it is not cyncial, it is not the cleverest of clever people's perspective. It is a simplistic pardoning of active malice as inherent nature.

Fuck that. Humans are capable of being better, should strive to be better, and we should stop accepting "Oh, but cruelty is just our nature" excusing of the few who deserve to be brought back from their intentional acts of evil, and reminded that good outnumber them, and good is fully bloody capable of administering some hard way redemption, so would they like the easy redeeming or the hard way redeeming on their path to not chosing evil as their outcome?

I had to turn this off, but it's something that allows Windows and anyone using your device to generate text/images.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

There's just an un-skip-able fifteen second ad every other time you open a door.

It's a free, no sign-up, no ads fitness resource created by professionals who view this as activism (fitness should be accessible to everyone), and it's very thoughtful and thorough.

Features I really like:

- all instructions for workout routines are diagrammed on single pages with a clean, easy to read layout

- there's 30 or 60 day programs you can follow if you, like me, don't know what to do. they take you through a rotation of workouts so you're working different muscle groups on different day for a specific purpose

- there's so much variety and there's a filter so you can find the level and your goals and type of workout you wanna do

- you don't need any equipment

- some of the programs are RPGs or adventure stories! How's that for motivation. There's also badges and achievements or something but I haven't looked that closely at how that works yet

- they're nerds. they name workouts after D&D classes. There's a Lannistrr workout, a batcave workout, a witcher workout

- I've only scratched the surface

I'm doing this really easy one to start out

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQSMS0J6JbrKdSOSbyJXaQ_zN_HSSp7zZ