Thoughts

Millions of people suffering from food and housing insecurity, constant stress over debt, inflation, low income, physically and emotionally sick and unable to access proper health supports, and all anyone in power cares about is what percentage of them have jobs. Not the quality of job, working conditions, or fair pay, just the technical number of unemployed. Despite what capitalists would have you believe, "job" is not a basic human need. Food, shelter, sex, a sense of belonging - these are basic human needs. The 1% (who do not "job") would have you believe that "job" is a gateway to meeting all your basic human needs, but we can see plainly that it is not. The rich perpetrate this lie so they can tell themselves they are heroes for being "job creators" instead of admitting they are exploiting our basic needs to enrich themselves past the point of abject absurdity.

Next time you're tempted to think that religious beliefs and lack of education aren't dangerous, think about the family in Brazil in 1986 who found some glowing powder and thought it was a blessing from god, rubbed it all over themselves and their bedsheets, spread it into their community, and then died of RADIATION POISONING because it was a chemotherapy chemical.

We're literally on the cusp of the eco-collapse of our civilization and the most powerful country in the world is arguing about which old white dude they should put in charge. Old white dudes are the reason everything's about to go tits up. I hope the rich enjoy watching the world burn to an unrecognizable crisp, sink, implode, starve and die off. Hope those billions make a nice fan before they become kindle.

When your argument about capitalism ends with the other person say "well yeah but there's nothing we can do about it" you realize their goal from the outset was just to make you shut up so they don't have to think or feel about the inhumane dystopia they're living in

Now that people are using AI to write web content, I keep noticing really confusing mistakes, strangely worded sentences, random misgenderization of cis people (trans people are sometimes misgendered on purpose so it's hard to know if any particular misgender is random)...I think we're at a stage where the internet is about to be overtaken by complete garbage, and we need a way to determine whether something is written by intelligent human experts creating quality or machines with the sole intention of creating quantity. The amount of garbage I'm seeing has devalued & makes me want to turn away from written content completely. And with deep fake video technology, video content will eventually go the same route. AI can be a very nice tool when used by humans with intention to create quality accurate information and art (though its unauthorized usage of human art as source material is very problematic), but when it is used to flood the internet with clickbait and bloat, it creates a billowing fog that takes more and more effort to wade through to find good sources of true information. We need a good, secure and universal way to flag machine vs human made content so we know what we're feeding our minds.

I've been seeing a lot of Jordan Peterson clips online lately and almost all seem to revolve around the idea that since trans people and "women these days" don't behave in a way men (or just he - he seems to conflate the two a lot) weren't socialized to expect of people, they are in the wrong. He doesn't know "what to do" with these people so he pretends he's going to ignore them while continuing to speak out about them. His aim is to try and force them to behave according to "social norms", and he insinuates that because they won't comply, it makes life harder for cis men (i.e. him and his incel following). This is a 60 year old man with degrees in political science and psychology who still has not realized that you cannot control everybody and everything around you so that you don't have to deal with things you don't understand. This 60 year old man stood in front of a classroom and bemoaned the fact that women are refusing to placate men's egos anymore, because men are socialized to need them to do it, so they should do it. This is a 60 year old man who doesn't think men should have to grow and adapt to deal with the changing world, because it's scary and difficult to grow and adapt. He demands everyone else continue to sacrifice their own needs and identity to make men (him) feel good. It amazes me that a man who spends his entire life in psychology is so blind to his own need for therapy.

If you aren't accidentally slow blinking at store clerks who greet you and random children on the bus can you really claim legitimate crazy catlady status

Maybe the most difficult thing about self-forgiveness is how it leads you into forgiving everyone else, too, even if you're still angry about how they hurt you. Because once you realize your actions were the best you could do with what your traumas left you, you realize the same must be true for the other people in your life. Your parents let you down in some ways because their parents let them down in some ways. Your ex screwed you up because they were screwed up by their traumas. It doesn't make what you suffered any less wrong, but it starts to dissolve the blame. The history of people around you is just a fucked up mess of a soup. It's nobody's fault, and it's not fair, but if you want better for yourself (and everyone you care about) you have to do the work to heal, even if you didn't deserve the wounds.

I know it's 2023 but I still see people body-shaming in social media comments under the paper-thin guise of "trying to help" (concern trolling). Tell these people that shame plays a big part in why we are over-eating and not taking better care of ourselves. Shame is quite often the main reason we are fat, so body-shaming is quite literally adding fuel to the fire. More shame makes us turn that much more to our unhealthy coping skills. People have unhealthy coping skills not because they are lazy, but because at some point those coping skills were the only ones we could access to make ourselves feel safe. So instead of shaming and making the world more unsafe, how about doing the opposite. Make us feel safe and worthy of our own self-care, and point us to information and resources so we can learn healthier ways to cope.