Yes, for us, a gram of caffeine is a double-whopper of a dose (about seven cups of strong coffee). Meanwhile a termite eating caffeine-laced wood gets a dose far greater in proportion to its body weight.

Just remember as much as humans suck, there’s something in nature doing something as perverse, or as heinous. Sure, we have limited empathy, so are inclined to sometimes know better. But we generally don’t know better enough.

EVOLUTION DOESN’T CARE ABOUT HAPPY

Appreciate your gut bacteria. They love you too.

Caffeine is the same thing. A poison to termites ( HUUUGE BUZZZZZZZ! ) that gives us a rush when we microdose it.

While I’m totally behind a world where Frank Zappa lives longer, the political problems of the US federal government are systemic. The Democratic party moved left out of necessity to oppose the Republican party, who has been trying to restore autocracy since the 1933 Business Plot failed, and FDR implemented the New Deal to prevent Communist revolution (because anything is better than living in cardboard boxes and eating flour paste to live.)

The card / board game Chrononauts expansion The Gore Years imagines an alternative in which the GOP delays of the Florida Recount were not successful, allowing Gore to win, but Andrew Looney posits a result of a Palin administration in 2008. To be fair, he also imagines avoiding WWII (hard to do) might create a period of European peaceful prosperity, so YMMV.

The 2024 election is an indictment not just of Americans but of the viability of democracy in a world where billionaires exists who can create disinformation campaigns that can convince the masses to make uninformed decisions against their own personal interests. In fact, the entire 20th century in the US has been a master class in how to subvert democracy, so even if we were able to reform federal elections (eliminate the EC, insert ranked choice voting or some other non-FPTP election model) elections may continue to be controlled by demagogy and massive propaganda machines.

We don’t know (all of) what must be done, but we do know neither US major political parties will willingly relinquish power to move towards public serving government. Considering how much it appears someone is fucking with a time machine to meddle with the past since at least 2000, Frank Zappa may yet live again.

I am left handed and enby.

Though the correlation intersection is between enby (or peripheral to gender norms) and ASD, which is a broad intersection. It also informs my penchant for over-explaining things.

I’m not mansplaining, it’s that the connectedness excites me like dinosaurs excite a toddler!

ETA Re: Anbidexterity, when I was in kindergarten I could, for a very short while, do letters with either hand and it was so cool. Then, in a playground accident, I broke my right forearm, so I learned to write while my right hand was in a cast. But yeah, I played piano (out of practice, now), and while I do mouse stuff with my left hand, I still joystick with my right hand due to early gaming on someone else’s computer.

That said, for fine work or throwing, I do that with my left hand.

PSS: That all said, computer input devices come in three flavors: Right handed, ambidextrous and rare, often not great left handed devices I don’t like. Usually I do ambidextrous options.

Frog frog. 🐸🐸

(Note we still only have a frog face emoji and not a full frog emoji)

Fuck Around and Find Out through the lens of The Scottish Play, so yes. Also noting that the weird sisters show up when someone’s about to FA so they can watch the FO part.

I’m developing a memeset of really common criticisms I have with the psychiatric sector, having been through it a lot and having expressed a lot of these as concerns to my new therapist / psychiatrist.

Speaking of which I’m freshly in therapy after a long stint without! Yay!

I keep having thoughts. Dangerous, untoward MCU Supervillain thoughts.

For instance, the reason we stopped doing outlawry ( wikipedia ) as a thing is because when you unperson someone, their only defense is to fight back and hide, and if that means a wondering child happens upon your camp, well, dead kids tell no tales.

So at the point that a given group is treated is stripped of rights enough that it threatens their life (say putting someone at risk for morbid pregnancy complications, or a homeless person needing to sleep) they are required by necessity ( wikipedia ) to defend themselves violently, since defending themselves procedurally is useless.

Which means it is right and proper for those people to stab anyone whose awareness of them and their predicament is a threat. And it’s right and proper to stab the monarchists who would strip us of our rights. Looking at you SCOTUS.

To me it looks like someone in the design department messed up.

And this is what we can expect from enshittified companies!

I took my own name and anagrammed it.

Anagram is a verb now.

The same folks that want to unperson women (and non-whites, and LGBT+) are the same folks who are poisoning our air until 500-year hurricanes become the norm, and we run out water and can’t feed everyone.

So we’re at a point that killing them for their transgressions is literally fighting for our lives and for humanity.

I think we’re one step away from suicide bombers. After all, if we’re going to be executed anyhow…

Eventually it will present a problem. An example of this happened not long ago when Iranian woman Mahsa Amini was harassed to death by the Iranian morality police, and the people decided that was one Iranian woman too many. The humiliation campaign followed, leading to hangings which lead to revolutionaries firebombing official buildings. A lot of people shot each other. A curious development was when the fundamentalists were bombing women’s schools with poisonous gas.

There eventually was an armistice and a negotiation, but the morality police still kills women by overpolicing, so it goes on.

Here in the states, we already have minorities and undesirables getting overpoliced to death by officers eager to use their guns or show them who is boss. When Trump opens the slips again, shit is going to get interesting. (As in that Chinese curse interesting. )

I also assure you in the meantime, Afghani men get a lot of food served with extra ingredients. Spite and resentment do not sit idly by.

Maybe communicate in a code of fire accelerants and sparks?

Eventually enough people will suffer and enough people will die that we’ll be angry, and when that happens, a pretty woman will get killed unjustly on camera, and we’ll decide that this is the hour in which violence is necessary.

Until that moment, violence will be unthinkable, including consideration of violence sometime in the future.

This isn’t to say violence is principled, or the right thing to do. It’s to say this is how violent uprising has manifested historically. And since Trump and his administration isn’t going to respect non-violent language, and will [send his agents to] respond violently, the only way the circumstances will change is when the people rise up violently, and rise up with enough support to overthrow the current government.

Four notes:

1. Once government is overthrown by coup d’etat, it’s really easy for a dictator to take over. If you want something other than a dictator taking over, you might want to have some bylaws at the ready.

2. Ideally get law enforcement to kill or brutalize attractive people on camera. That will make sympathizers of onlookers and activists of sympathizers.

3. If you’re going to warm up to raising an army from the people, start with a humiliation campaign or a sabotage campaign if you can do so without dropping tells the massive surveillance state can pick up. Funny is good and draws onlookers towards becoming sympathists. In the end, law enforcement will use live bullets and won’t bother with arrests except to torture you and break your spirit for the enjoyment of their masters. Make their victories Pyrrhic.

4. The front lines of resistance and rebellion groups suffer from terrible attrition rates like German submariners. They will capture you, or if you’re lucky, kill you in the middle of combat. And you’ll be known in history. That is, as all those countless songs observe, the price that is paid for liberation. (Thanks, lots!)

So low-strata fascists are typically like low strata cultists^† in that they’re typically drawn in by neo-nazis (or whoever) giving an ounce of regard to them when they’re alone and socially isolated. The indoctrination and costly identity markers follow.

At least this is my take based on stories I’ve heard from those who have escaped hate groups, militant groups and dangerous NRMs. Transition from membership to outsider (optimally involved in more benign social groups) is difficult and takes a while.

That said, fascists are dangerous both by being politically active (in the US, politically active in a system where safety checks have been stripped away or subverted) and by being violent or engaging in direct action. And in these cases, doing what is necessary to stop them can qualify as self-defense.

† As a cult researcher, I feel the need to define this, since cult is a loaded word. By low-strata cultist I mean a low-rung member of a dangerous NRM or seller from an MLM.

It does. I know I tend to underestimate myself, especially when my major depression symptoms kick in hard and I just sleep for months at a time. But sometimes I can help. Sometimes it’s just sweeping floors, or making clever art or being a sympathetic ear to other people who have given up.

We don’t know our futures, and small opportunities to help can still happen.

The very worst sober-gaze-into-the-abyss case is we become another point added to a statistic. Another hate crime victim, another suicide after our benefits were cancelled. Slightly better than that is being the next Mahsa Amini (the victim of the Iranian morality police who sparked the last major civil unrest), or the next George Floyd. But while we will have some of these, we’ll also have survivors who can help to assist other survivors, or to drive the movements toward justice and prevention. These are the beams that make the structures of our moral and political systems that don’t depend on violent enforcement.

In the meantime, make art, make observations, make memes, make conversation. Stay alive for sake of staying alive, because there are a lot of unfilled roles in the progressive social movements we need.

Thank you. I had no idea what he was talking about. Though I should have