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Cake day: May 10th, 2024

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  • I’m not so sure good policy is the way to do it… but I do know from political experience that good policy is something EVERYONE hates. Precisely because it doesn’t benefit them exclusively.

    Our problem we’re butting up against is this, that as individuals we are resistant to the bitter medicine we know will help us. So we have no choice but to elect leaders we know will trick the population in some way, but we never know what’s a trick and what’s a power grab for personal gain. (Present admin excluded, they’re a painfully transparent consequence of our society abandoning community and education.)

    But we had a social democracy in the US that lasted more than 200 years. That’s not a bad run, it’s proof of concept. Maybe the USA will splinter and fracture, but from that will come new ideas, new areas of democratic progress and new alliances and power groups who now know that such a thing is possible.

    I don’t think we’re going to have a unified world, at least not in our lives and certainly not with our existing social systems, but war and disease and atrocities broadly are on a decline across the globe. It may spike again in places and at times, but despite that we are living in an age of unprecedented peace and prosperity, that shows that something we’re doing is working, but we have to manage and maintain it by resisting apathy and nihilism. If we stop seeing the positives and stop caring, we backslide to raiders looting our houses and raping and pillaging our communities.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzTHE CRAZY PILLS
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    2 days ago

    look where it got us

    I mean, you can easily point to the atrocities that the USA was built on and feel a deep sense of shame, and we collectively should, we should remember the horrors of the past. But having a social democracy exist and survive as long as it did was proof of concept of an experiment that was not supposed to work. It’s proof that we can do better if we unify just a little. Yes, it could have been better or lasted longer, but we don’t exactly have a lot of alternatives. We’re fucking animals. The fact that we can do any of this at all is amazing.

    But we can easily play this “would we have been better off” game forever. Back until we first started killing each other for thousands of years which led to our brains developing into this absurd thing we have now. Would we have been better off if the USA was never founded? Would the Native Americans have been better off? Would the Europeans? (Read Pastwatch, good speculative ideas on all this.)

    The reality is though that we’re here now and we’re better off as a society than we’ve ever been. Yes, there are bad things happening, but it’s in the decline. We just feel bad because we don’t live long enough to see that long arc of history and cannot see that tangible, powerful decline in war, disease, suffering, murder and rape and so many other every-day horrors we all had to live with for literally thousands and thousands of years. I can easily count the number of times my house has been raided, and that number is one time, and it wasn’t even an armed militia, it was just some random, confused person. That’s a MASSIVE improvement historically speaking.

    What I think is fucking with a lot of our heads is that we imbibe in fictions without taking away the good lessons and grounded, material lessons. We read novels or watch Star Trek and believe that we’re entitled to the stars, that we have this glorious, unified future just around the corner, that all we have to do is make X policies and elect candidate Y and we will have world peace and food replicators.

    Nah dog, we’re not going out there. We’re not going to get better than this. Maybe our non-human descendants in a very, very long time from now, but currently, creating a democracy that lasts more than 200 years might be the absolute best we can do.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzTHE CRAZY PILLS
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    2 days ago

    Our species broadly is far more concerned with narratives and stories than reality. This is how our brains work on a very fundamental level.

    People think their brains are tools for determining reason and logic, and I suppose with exercise and effort they can be, but it’s not what we’re designed for.

    We have brains designed to tell stories to explain how you feel, or to feel things about stories supplied to you. That’s it. It doesn’t need to make sense or have logical consistency, the brain doesn’t give a shit about consistency or reason, it just wants to tie loose ends together to create a coherent narrative that you can use to survive.

    See huge paw prints by your watering hole? Feel worried? Your brains writes the most likely story for how those prints got there and why you’re scared. In that situation the story-telling can save your life. In our modern, complex world we have the exact same brains structurally, but the clues and emotional signals are vastly more complicated and others supply us stories for why we feel those feelings, and brains soak that shit up like sponges. We take the narratives supplied to us and twist them and turn them and find ways to fit them into our own lives because this is how our minds work. The whole time thinking you’re figuring something out or doing something good for yourself or your future. Like you’re part of the story.

    We have no future until we start accepting the weaknesses and flaws in our own minds and can set up policy-level safeguards against ourselves, but I don’t see that happening since the people who should be managing these safeguards are as fallible as any of us.


  • Here’s how you know how many of those are bots.

    Wait 6 - 12 months and then look at Turning Point’s numbers. Whatever is left will be bots.

    Conservatives broadly are not at all interested in donating any of their already-stretched salary past whatever their attention spans demand. This is why they need constant new threats, drama and ordeals to keep people engaged. They have the attention spans of toddlers, the human brain simply cannot always be on guard against existential threats that never materialize so the story has to keep shifting.

    Funny that.


  • What if you’re the politically motivated wife of a powerful, wealthy extremist? And you met Donald Trump as a beauty queen and had deep ties to defense contractors through your parents, and met said wealthy extremist at a rally and had a whirlwind romance that led to marriage just a few months later, and then stand to inherit the entire empire if said wealthy extremist were to suddenly die?

    Look, I’m not saying Erika Kirk did it, but she sure isn’t suffering as a result. Maybe we don’t have the whole story yet.


  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzI c it!
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    5 days ago

    Additionally, if you can make sunlight shine through a tiny hole that is somewhat level with the ground into a dark room or box, onto a flat, white surface, you can often see a projection of the world outside if the sun is hitting everything just right, the image will be upside-down and reversed, but often in full color like a video image.

    Naturally occuring camera obscura must have freaked people the fuck out in olden times.







  • ameancow@lemmy.worldto2meirl4meirl@lemmy.world2meirl4meirl
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    7 days ago

    Mental health struggle veteran here, I feel the need to address each of these items as I have badges and achievements unlocked for each.

    1. Binge Drinking: by far the worst on this list, every time you binge-drink you are not only damaging your brain and increasing your likelihood for medical problems, you need to understand that your brain has an “equilibrium” system, where every time you flood your brain with pleasure chemicals, it will try to “level it off” by flooding your brain with the opposite. It takes much longer to clear these “downer” chemicals than it takes to ingest pleasure chemicals. So every time you binge drink, you will have days or weeks of even worse depression and skyrocketing anxiety. As you binge-drink more, your liver will develop scars that make it work less efficiently, chemicals like ammonia can build up in your blood and make you disoriented, confused and unable to function normally. Alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs as it’s easily available and can be lethal to withdraw from, as well lethal from long-term use. Alcohol is the second most lethal drug in the world. (Number one is smoking tobacco.)

    2. Porn: A lot of people don’t understand why porn is dangerous, particularly if they already have a relationship and say things like “It’s not distorting my perception of healthy relationships, I’m already married!” and the like. The problem with porn is again, the over-adaptability of the brain. Orgasm is one of the best training tools your body has, it’s a massive flood of pleasure chemicals so it will teach your brain how to interact with the world and how to receive pleasure - one danger of regular porn use, is you are teaching your brain to only get happiness while looking at porn, then when you’re not looking at porn, you become unhappy. Like with everything else on this list, indulge with care and moderation.

    3. Isolating yourself for days: more of a consequence of depression than a coping mechanism. But also one of those very dangerous and difficult hurdles to get over, because human beings are inherently, hard-wired to be social creatures. We survived cosmic disasters and ice-ages going back millions of years by forming tight-knit communities and banding together, so it’s not an option - you need social exposure, even if it’s in small amounts until you become more comfortable. Isolation increases your chances of deepening your depression and rumination cycles and making everything else worse. Get out and go around other people even if it’s strangers, you will slowly start to rebuild those connective parts of your brain and be more comfortable with reaching out for help.

    4. Gaming all day: just like porn, you are teaching your brain to only feel pleasure from one single kind of activity, and games are designed to give you these pleasure chemical boosts, so it’s unexpectedly easy to get addicted to gaming. Moderate anything that makes you feel this way, take frequent breaks, walk around, change your mental environment. Take time to clean your living space and yourself or the problem will get worse and worse.

    5. Getting really fucking high: Same song and dance as with games and porn, you are re-wiring your brain to cope with feelings of pain and pleasure through an outside source, making it much, much harder to deal with your feelings when you’re not imbibing in the outside source. This is why they say that while cannabis isn’t physically addictive, it can be psychologically addictive, like anything that can give you a pleasure/reward feedback. You can get addicted to pot, rock climbing or broccoli if they give you that mental reward, so moderate or quit or you will make your problem worse without the substance or escape tool.

    6. Browsing reddit for hours: While this shares some of the same issues as other dopamine-hit escape tools, specifically to reddit - you have to understand that most of what goes on in reddit discussions is not real, it’s full of either exaggerated takes that don’t reflect what normal life is like, or it’s wholey fabricated by bots for engagement and sensationalism. If you delve too deep into reddit, like any social media site, you will only end up arming your brain with stupid nonsense to ruminate on. Scrolling social media constantly is as bad for you health as doing drugs or porn, but strangely more socially acceptable.

    7. Crying into a pillow: The best thing on this list. If you can find a way to get emotional release of pent up despair and can actually cry it out, you WILL feel better after, it’s just chemistry again, everything is chemistry. Your brain will seek to comfort your despair, you will get that equilibrium again, you will feel a wash of pleasure/reward chemicals after a good cry. What you need to beware of is rumination though, you HAVE to manage your mental storytelling, because you can quickly get stuck in patterns of despair from having reoccuring ideas and thoughts that make your depressive episodes worse and last longer. Learn to identify when your brain starts to write stories to explain how you feel and you can nip depressive episodes before you lose days, weeks, months or years to cycles of rumination and depression.

    8. Not eating: your body needs nutrients to function, even if you hate it, even if it hurts, even if you’re sobbing while forcing scrambled eggs or mashed potatoes down your throat, you HAVE to eat or all your symptoms will get worse. Nobody is coming. Nobody will notice and start taking care of you. Nobody is going to feel sorry for you and notice how much pain you’re in, you have to pick yourself up and start learning to care about yourself because nobody else is going to do it for you. Yes, it sucks and life is miserable, but when this passes and you start feeling good again, as normally happens, you WILL regret not taking better care of yourself when you were in pain. A healthier diet will also help add to the list of things that will help you feel better and have fewer episodes.



  • ameancow@lemmy.worldto196@lemmy.blahaj.zoneCast iron rule
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    10 days ago

    You need to really be into cooking before something like cast iron versus whatever else will ever be an issue in your life.

    I yanked my set of cast iron out from under an abandoned single-wide trailer in the desert next to a junk-yard, they were partially buried in an ant mound. Over the last couple decades I have abused them hard, both in restoration and in cooking/cleaning, they’re just work-horse cookware I don’t have to be too concerned about, but if I put a little extra effort in I can use them to get a perfect crust on a ribeye when I cook meat for friends and family. If that kind of thing is important to you… well don’t worry, you can also get that with steel!

    People who obsess about their cast iron just either really, really enjoy micromanagement in their lives, or have nothing else that makes them feel special.






  • ameancow@lemmy.worldtoPeople Twitter@sh.itjust.worksdoomsday
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    11 days ago

    With our gun. And because we have so many really good guns

    Literally all our violence problems in the USA stem from this kind of massive insecurity and self-reaffirmation. The guns are a product of this kind of feeling of isolationism and fear, not a cause.

    How do you know if someone is a conservative white american? They will start babbling about firearms almost instantly when you talk about the possibility of destabilization.

    How do you know if someone is one of the many millions of liberal or leftist firearm owners? You won’t. They don’t feel need to whip it out and stroke it in front of strangers. The Finnish are laughing at you.

    The post here is both right and wrong. You do need guns to survive in a post-collapse situation, but vast, vast majority of gun-toting americans would either not survive or become the worst kinds of raiders and bandits themselves because they don’t create community or sustainable systems in that community to keep people alive, and tend to ignore the importance of countless other facets of actual survival.