nickwitha_k (he/him)

Eh. Conservatism does exist but, it’s never been what it’s claimed to be. It’s all about establishing and enforcing hierarchical power structures in society by any means necessary. Almost universally, the adherents desire to have power over others, so, even if they’re not at the top, they get to be cruel towards their “lessers” and that makes them feel better about themselves. Through the lens of their philosophy, things like hypocrisy are privileges of those higher in the hierarchy with which to taunt their “lessers”.

Additionally, they do not believe in objective reality but, subjective reality that bends to their will (when it doesn’t, they deny the delta and pretend that it does). This applies to morality as well; moral correctness is relative to one’s place in the hierarchy, not their actions (ie supporting a convicted felon, rapist and pedophile is ok because he’s rich and supports hierarchy).

The reason, I think, that the belief system has been able to stick around so long (beyond the propaganda) is that its followers do gain some mental health benefits. They are able to reduce their cognitive load through deference to their rulers and reduce potential for anxiety and depression by avoiding self-reflection and embracing the Just World Fallacy.

You love to see it.

Yup. As jerry illustrated, this shit isn’t free.

Donations, subscriptions, etc are definitely fine. They are not invasive fuckery that inflict themselves on people without consent, nor do they seep into the space in a commercial manner. Ads do not respect consent and they fundamentally force commerce into every place that they touch.

Ads are the root of the rot in the www.

I read it as a poly relationship of some sort.

38 (cis-M) here. Yes, I do want kids and have pretty much all of my life. I want to give them opportunities that I didn’t have, encourage pro-social attitudes, and share in the joy and wonder of discovering things that, as an adult, are very much taken for granted. At this point, however, I’m getting pretty doubtful that it will happen.

Coming up on 10 years with my spouse and I’m not sure that I’d even have the energy at this point - being sole income and providing care for someone who has disabling mental health conditions and endometriosis has been extremely stressful and exhausting. And she’s back and forth on whether she even wants children, due to said conditions (which is not unreasonable). If we had more partners than just the two of us to share the load, it could work but, endo is chronic, degenerative and hers has only been getting worse recently so, I’m not too optimistic - for bio or non-bio.

Quick footnote on the subject: The “selfish ones” related to having children are the anti-natalists and anti-childfree people who think that everyone has the same life experience as them and want to judge others based upon their myopic views. Having children is not inherently moral or immoral - it’s just a function of biology and a personal decision.

Abso-fucking-lutely not. People need to be able to exist without having hypercommercialism forced on them everywhere.

Hope he uses the saved energy to double down and remove every last right-winger from the party.

Seconded. Not coming up with much when trying to find out more about it.

ISO 8601/RFC-3339 (Unix Epoch also acceptable) gang reporting in.

This might help. https://smcl.org/blogs/post/making-sense-of-reading-levels/

I had to look it up because of your comment. It’s been over a decade since I dealt with anything in the AP Style Guide or adjacent. Fortunately, you are correct.

Sadly, yes. It is largely a consequence of two things: constant right-wing efforts to destroy public education and neoliberal profiteering. The first requires little explanation. The second is something that I only learned about because LeVar Burton (Geordie LaForge in Star Trek TNG) has produced a documentary on it and has been participating in activism to try to fix the damage.

Basically, with the neoliberal philosophy that profit is more important than anything else, education fell into the sights of profiteers. Through connections and back-room deals, schools have been forced to adopt proprietary “literacy” methods and tools that were initially developed explicitly to allow people with diminished cognitive capacity to somewhat function in society. This means that there’s a whole generation that only learned how to do things like guess what a word is based on its shape, rather than understanding its phonetics or figuring out its meaning from its constituent roots.

This profiteering, as a side effect, also harms education overall as it has robbed people of their ability to engage in self-learning. Something that is only helping to cause further harm with people off-loading cognitive efforts to LLMs, and not having the skills to differentiate between when they spout pure bullshit and output something that is useful or factual.

There are those of us who will never see the protest (non-)voters as allies again due to their willingness to ignore the basic math of the election and enable fascists to win to “prove a point”. They are a step away from collaborators and hold part of the responsibility for every person who has been kidnapped by ICE, the end of a possibility of a free Palestine, every murdered protestor, every trans youth who commits suicide because they are denied care, every child that dies from measles.

Performative bullshit driven by the desire to feel moral superiority while helping get a fascist elected and undoing a century of civil and societal progress doesn’t make one an ally. It makes them useful idiots to the far-right and betrayers of people in vulnerable populations, everyone whose life is ruined by global warming.

I might forgive this who take responsibility and try to lend a hand in the multi-generation effort to try repairing the damage that has been in under 200 days (protest voters have fucked over GenX through Alpha, at the very least). But, as long as I live, I’ll not forget, nor will I allow them or anyone else to do so, lest someone make the mistake of thinking that they would stand up for anyone in any effective manner capable of positive change.

ackshully…https://hackerfab.ece.cmu.edu/

Yup. I’ve been pissed off at him since he started using the pied piper approach to avoid competition from the left, during Trump’s first term. He’s done a lot of good and bad since.

Resulting proportionality would fix all of that, and guarantee that a minority party like the GOP never gets total power. But, that’s a bit of a pipe dream.

Technoautocorrect

He did some great things during the peak but, since, he’s frequently been nothing but a corpo ghoul. Sabotaging efforts to break up convicted killer and “power company”^* PG&E. Supporting rate increases so that the board of convicted killer and “power company”, PG&E didn’t have to face any actual penalties for killing people. Adamantly opposing any wealth tax. Putting significant support behind RTO/quiet layoffs.

EDIT: Forgot my own footnote.

^* “power company” here used in quotes because they seem more practiced in getting away with murdering people though negligence and avoiding consequences for knowingly contaminating water supplies with carcinogens.