This is nowhere near the average price
Privatizing our space program was a great idea, everything neoliberalism touches turns to gold!
Fucking morons
I’ll engage with you in case you are acting in good faith.
“Helps” here is an interesting take, but not an uncommon one. There have been and continue to be a lot of people that when they see someone who has adhd or autism or some other neurodivergence think “let’s help them act ‘normal’”
If you are a neurotypical person you might even genuinely be thinking this is a good thing and in some ways it can be. Providing accommodations and life skills that are compatible with neurodivergence can make a world of difference.
The problem is that there is a long history of “help” being neither accommodations nor life skills, but discipline and shame. Here’s a thought experiment if you are neurotypical that might help.
Imagine that the world was majority autistic, since autistic individuals are the majority they consider their way of thinking to be neurotypical and you are neurodivergent. You want to do things that make sense to your brain, you’d like to make small talk and you find it very hard to stay focused during your school days 4-hour special interest hyper focus time.
Society “helps” you by telling you you are lazy and unfocused and all the normal people are able to spend 4 hours in a row completely consumed by their special interest but you keep wanting to talk or have variety and it’s very disruptive. They teach you “how to hyper focus” but nothing they say works for you, your brain isn’t wired to do this. They scold you when you don’t. They finally decide the best path would be to label you divergent and give you powerful stimulants so that you can remain hyper focused like a normal person. They “help” you.
And then one day you learn about how your brain is simply different, that you shouldn’t have felt bad all those years for being unable to do something your brain just isn’t wired to do. You realize that you don’t even really know the person that you are because your whole life you’ve been faking it, running scripts that they taught you so people won’t be upset at you, and taking chemicals to force your brain into an unnatural configuration.
Then someone comments on your post “So what you are saying is a good upbringing helps.” How would you feel?
I have some bad news for you if you think the ruling class gives one wet fart whether or not people vote.
“Not voting” doesn’t matter to a corrupt politician, they don’t care if you stay home. There will never be a voter turnout so low that the ruling class will go “oh shucks, they all stopped voting I guess we have to give up our wealth and power now.”
Voting is not the solution to the problems that plague our society, but just like how putting out a wildfire doesn’t solve climate change, you still put the fire out before it burns a bunch of shit down.
In case you are wanting the history. IBM actually coined the term PC with their IBM Personal Computers
At the time most computing platforms were incompatible. Software written for a commodore computer wouldn’t work with an apple computer wouldn’t work with an IBM PC.
The IBM PC was popular enough though that people started building “pc compatible” machines. A very popular configuration for this was intel chips with Microsoft DOS. While these machines started out as “pc compatible” after a while the IBM PC wasn’t a big deal anymore so saying “we are compatible with a machine released in 1981” just slowly morphed into “it’s a PC” as shorthand for “intel chipset with Microsoft OS”
Now why didn’t apple get the pc moniker? At the time when the IBM PC launched apple was actively building and selling their own computers and weren’t interested in making them IBM PC clones so they never went out and marketed themselves as “pc compatible” because for the most part they were not.
Thanks for attending my Ted talk
Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
What with the Clintons proven track record of… checks notes… losing miserably to trump. I don’t know why anyone would listen
I tried to go back and watch the Dark Knight Batman movies because I remembered enjoying them when they first came out.
There’s an early scene where there is a Batman impersonator and he goes “what’s the difference between me and you” and Batman goes “I’m not wearing hockey pads”
It’s supposed to be a real zinger. As I watched it though the realization hit me that what he’s really saying is “because I have money so the rules don’t apply to me” and then I realized that that’s kinda the entire point of Batman. He’s a billionaire that’s decided he’s wealthy enough that silly things like laws don’t apply to him.
Really made me not enjoy the movie and I ended up turning it off.
It gives you the defaults for the body type and then allows you to change them if desired. I can’t imagine getting worked up over it, in like a billion hours of gameplay there’s 5 seconds easily missed where they acknowledge pronouns exist, the horror.
I’d consider your fear to be rational, although others might disagree.
Governments, by their nature, hold a monopoly on the “legitimate use of violence.” That’s a pretty terrible power to abuse and the best systems we have for holding power in check is to diffuse it into many people and set those people somewhat at odds with each other, aka, checks and balances.
I would consider J6 to be a failed coup, and coups are often about consolidating power into fewer and fewer hands, purging groups at odds with a strong man leader, which is fertile ground for abuse of power.
Now though you have to decide what to do with that fear. You have to decide how you want that fear to be a part of your life. Fear exists to tell us of danger, it’s our limbic system telling us to pay attention. You get to decide now if this danger is real and if living in fear is appropriate.
There are many reactions to fear, but I’ve found that positive action and mental health support are good responses to fear.
As an example, I struggle with anxiety, and it sucks because when you are anxious about something it’s common to avoid it and then you never fix it so it makes you more anxious and then you avoid it more, repeat. It took mental health support in the form of therapy and anti anxiety medicine to give me the tools I needed to start taking positive action that started tackling the things causing me anxiety. Now though, much less anxiety, the things that made me anxious weren’t helpful, it wasn’t helpful to my life to be constantly worrying about things I could address once I wasn’t constantly worrying.
Fear is a difficult emotion to live with day in and day out. Perhaps there are positive actions you can take to help address these fears, run for office, vote, volunteer for candidates you believe in. I know that therapy was helpful for me in understanding why I feel what I feel and how to make healthy choices around those feelings.
I hope you find some measure of peace though, you aren’t alone. I share your concerns, and many other people do, and I’ve decided to work my hardest to prevent it since that’s all I can do. History is full of assholes trying to fuck shit up for their own benefit and decent people unfucking that shit up.
One thing to consider when you constantly feel something is “why?”
Why are you constantly afraid of the government?
Fear is our response to danger, it motivates us to take actions to protect ourselves. Fear in the presence of danger is normal, fear in the absence of danger is not a tremendously helpful emotion. The hard part now is really truly identifying why you fear the government.
Your first reaction might be to start listing grievances, the direct reason you fear the government. This could range from reasonable concerns, “they have a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence and use that monopoly to attack me physically,” to less reasonable concerns like “they are lizard people.”
I’d invite you though to try to not stop at the list of grievances and interrogate “why” you believe that grievance is real.
Consider these two examples.
I fear the government because the police beat me up. I fear being beaten up because physical violence is painful and living without physical safety is truly dangerous. My fear is likely a reasonable response.
I fear the government because they are going to join in a new world order where the satanists and the the blue-eyed people are plotting to turn us all into Babylon 5 fans by putting sriracha in the public water supply. I fear this because I’ve watched several thousand hours of YouTube videos be people that have convinced me of this plot. The people making these videos are trustworthy because… hmm… they say they are. The people making the videos make money by me watching their videos and buying their merchandise because I believe in them. I believe in them because they claim to have the only way to keep me safe from this danger I’m very afraid of. Uh oh, this fear is irrational and being fed by people that profit off me always being afraid.
This old video by thoughtslime perfectly explains this and when I saw it years ago it really opened my eyes to what bothered me about your average liberal.
https://youtu.be/dsasDeI0VRg